A Feather Tale
by The Water Daemon
Summary: A space odyssey involving a young Dr. Frank Sloth, Space Faerie, Gormos, and Jerdana on a quest to find the Fountain of Youth.
1. In which Frank is an exposition whore

Let me tell you a faerie tale.

It begins, as any good tale of fantasy, ages ago, far before the modern Neopian age. This was a time before Neopets, when Faerieland still hung as a prominent skylocked kingdom instead of an amusing diversion for bored and unemployed Neopians. This was a time even before the primordial, toxic soup that encased Neopia for eons, a time when forgotten continents were stitched onto the water skin of the planet and intelligent life roamed the lush greenery of these landmasses. This was a time where sky and land lived in harmony, only gravity an obstacle.

Faeries, of course, owned the sky. An all-female race, they were admired for their grace and beauty, with iridescent wings and slender builds. With their archaic systems of magic, they constructed floating cities with ease, buildings that floated on cloud like buoys at sea. They built castles, and infrastructure imagined only by minds accustomed to extravagance eager to proliferate that ideal.

The ground, however, was the dominion of the Feathers. They were a race of all-males, and though their ancestors could perform magic, their cultural reliance on a stringent system of logic and science had severed them from their ability to execute the ancient art. While they too had wings like the Faeries, theirs were burdened with flesh and feathers, enormous Pteri wings attached to the back of their handsome, humanoid forms. When magic coursed from their fingers, it was rumored that these wings had a purpose. Soon, however, it came that Feather wings were useless, and used instead only for festivals, body language and other recreational activities. They could only stare at the sky filled with darting faeries in envy while they toiled on the ground, hooked to dirt and grime by gravity.

Desperate to be able to contact the Faerie species without reliance on Faerie magic, Feathers poured their population's brain power into the technology that could help them achieve the sky. They built impossible structures, skyscrapers, that attempted to make contact with the very lowest level of Faerie architecture. They built ships powered by volatile fuels to send valiant crewmen into the stars, to hopefully hover momentarily with the Faerie race.

This skyward ambition worried the Faeries. Accustomed to being the sole possessors of sky and space, they felt the Feathers threatened their territory with their newfangled air planes and tall towers. Superstition and fear simmered inside Faerie sentiment towards the Feathers. The Feathers, oblivious to the social consciousness of Faerieland, continued their hopeful ascent.

The straw that broke the Gnorbu's back was the Feathers' construction of a new space station. In its stainless steel complexity, it orbited Neopia like a second Kreludor, just above the highest Faerie tower. The Faeries saw this as the ultimate offense. The Feathers had unabashedly interloped on their territory, and for this, the greedy ground dwellers must be punished.

The Queen Faerie, the supreme practitioner of Faerie magic, concocted a special spell under the new moon, rumored to be assisted by the dark faerie that would later be known as the Darkest Faerie. (Me, I've never believed in rumors.) Though she bottled it in the most benign glass bottles, it contained a curse fouler than thirty plagues. And while the moon hid its face from this abominable sin, the Queen Faerie permitted this noxious potion to rain down upon the unsuspecting Feathers.

I won't go into the details of the damage. Suffice to say the potion contained a crippling illness that stripped an infected Feather of his wings, distorted his handsome features into that of a monster—turned him as green, terrible, and twisted as the hearts of the Faeries that produced such a hateful spell. These were only the symptoms of the disease. The real damage came with the destruction of internal organs, slowly dissolving them one by one.

The Feathers cried up to the heavens in anguish. The heavens returned a silence as deep as space, and continued to rain suffering. Chaos tore through the population. Those who had escaped infection holed themselves up in isolation, while the infected stumbled through the streets and unleashed the roars of dying beasts. Feather civilization crumbled. Walls could not keep out the disease. Soon, those in isolation perished just as the others.

The Feathers abolished, the Faeries continued their peaceful lives, undisturbed by the torment their leaders had created below. The Queen Faerie, sensing no signs of life on the still planet below, sent down a final spell to spoil the seas and break apart the land. There would be no evidence of Feather civilization, buried beneath a sea of acid. Neopia would start anew, it was decided. In a few millennia, the Faeries would create a new species, subservient to themselves: Neopets.

In the mean time, those few Feathers stationed in the orbiting space station only watched on in horror, agonizingly safe from their kinsmen's suffering. They were a crew of five: a computer tech, an astronomer, a doctor, a mechanic, and a cook. They were proclaimed the best and brightest of Feathers in their respective specialties at the peak of Feather civilization—now they were the final survivors. The cook and astronomer, nominally expendable, decided to descend to the earth and expire with their families. The computer tech and mechanic both elected to stay on the ship, while the doctor urged the remaining crew to use the escape pods to search for the intergalactic center their space probes had detected in a far off region, fearing the Faeries would attack the space station as well as a death by slow starvation. The computer tech and mechanic refused to listen to the doctor. The doctor, filled with paranoia, left in the escape pod alone.

It was his privilege to watch as a blast of Light Faerie magic destroy his last two comrades while the pod escaped into space.

So the Feathers were destroyed and eliminated from history—except for one. What became of that sole survivor, the final carrier of Feather DNA? Did space swallow him whole? Or did the worm hole funnel outwards again, and lead him to that suspected intergalactic meeting place for a plethora of species?

Faeries typically end this tale differently, if they tell it at all. Of course, they tell the whole story differently—Feathers become the malevolent aggressors, determined to conquer and oppress Faerieland, and the plague becomes instead a spell that either makes the Feathers vanish, sends them to another planet, or transforms them into Faeries. (Just as they, supposedly, had always wished.) They tell of no survivors, or at least of no Feathers ever returning to Neopia.

Both endings are wrong. Lies—the old standby of the Faerie species. That Feather doctor survived, and he returned to Neopia. And boy, was he surprised to see his homeland overrun with pastel-colored Faerie worshippers.

I was that petrified doctor Feather in that tiny escape pod, barely able to handle the controls. The way I left Neopia wasn't the way I returned. Both my home and I had changed.

So now let me tell you a Feather tale. A survivor's tale. A tale of a medical-surgeon, determined to scrape out a living in the precipitous and outlaw-ridden environment of space. This time around, there will be Neopets—an alien Aisha (never a native species to Neopia) and a Kougra, the Kougra that would be the start of his species on Neopia. And yes, there will be a faerie, but only one. Her name's Hoshiya. You may know her as the Space Faerie.

My name is Dr. Frank Sloth, and this is my story.


	2. In which we meet the furry lovable oaf

((J. Dac says: Hey, thanks for reading, all. I apologize in advance if things are rocky, the plot jumps around, or if there are severe inconsistencies in voice/facts. There've been BIG breaks in real-time between when I've written certain parts, and I never proofread fan fiction because I'm lazy.

Also, I originally intended this for publication in the Neopian Times, which is why nobody swears (and thus many people sound ridiculous and unnatural, especially thug-types), Frank doesn't smoke and violence is extremely veiled for the first few chapters. After consulting with a few friendly bearers of bad news at the Neopian Times Writer's Forum, I realized it was STILL unpublishable because of some petty, ridiculous rules. (How I yearn for the days of Mr. Shankly.) So now I'm just writing it however I please, and might gut it later to try to get it published. (Although that's never worked before, a thing I learned with "Neopian Beauty" AND "Frank," which I virtually raped while editing for content and still got rejected for something dumb. Or maybe my writing's honestly that bad? Inferiority complex, hollah.) Bah, I'm sorry, this sounds like the foreward to an enraged manifesto against the NT, and I guess in some ways it is. Of course, it's sort of my fault for writing mature material for a children's fandom.

Anyway, I appreciate your comments, really, because of all of the trouble and grief I've had with the NT and censorship, and I'm having a shit time lately in real life, with writing and other things. Alright, 'nuff of my fussing. I solemnly swear I'll keep the soapboxing to a minimum for future.))

Surgery starts with a rush of water with hands thrust beneath—a cleansing, not unlike a religious rite. And with those hands sterilized, one makes the awkward voyage from sanitation to surgical theatre, handling the door with feet acrobatics. Inside, the patient awaits like the newly dead, laid out on stainless steel. The anesthetic tube trailing down their windpipe tugs at their lower lips and gives their faces a ridiculous quality, and this almost interrupts the seriousness of the process until I see the tools. Laid out like weaponry on a sheet of powder blue, their fierce twinkling never fails to catch my eye—tremble my heart. They are the single-toothed keys that allow me entrance past the soft wall of flesh. So silently, they bite past that barrier with the tenderness of a kiss, drawing out a sweet red line of passion. And inside: ugliness. The organs, not meant to be seen by human eyes, the color of bruises and meat, pulsate in their own slick wretchedness.

The only organ I've ever had respect for in spite of its vulgarity—not including the brain—was the heart. Perhaps it's the self-sustaining nature of the heart that earns my admiration, a muscle so resilient and obsessed with its task that, placed within a glass of proper chemicals, will continue its endless beating. Perhaps it's due to the body's function hinging on the blood: stop the sucker, and the whole system unravels. And perhaps it's because of that ancient association of the heart with feeling and emotion, and how hard it is to reconcile that red-purple pump with such sappy sentiment.

For the most part, though, I attribute it to the difficulty operating on the heart presents. One has to pay the entrance fee of breaking back the ribcage—sometimes an even steeper price in other species. Yet the heart (strangely, unlike the conventional brain) seems to be a constant among sentient species. I appreciate its familiarity. When you've lost your home, you learn to appreciate anything familiar, even in the details.

Surgical-medical—I was somewhat of a holy mixture of talent within the Feather community, able to diagnose and treat chemically just as well as I could cut and rearrange. Upon arriving in an intergalactic community, however, my talent was somewhat diminished. While that giant meeting place of species across the galaxy, nay, the universe came like a miracle on my radar screen, its entrance into my life foretold overwhelming difficulties. After all, I was a surgeon-doctor for a now all-but-extinct species. Anatomy of aliens would be a whole new frontier to forge. Not to mention the language barrier.

Luckily, I managed to dock my puttering escape pod in a public port, despite being unfamiliar with the formalities of space parking. Luckily, as well, the toll keeper didn't have a stick crammed up his bum, and acknowledged my craft as an exotic specimen of an undiscovered species, and thus temporarily exempt from the fees typically charged for docking. Luckily (though this fortune wasn't apparent at first), my docking was more like a crash-landing, and my escape pod plowed right into the craft of one Gormos Kamen Kougra, a first-class mechanic.

After Gormos finished bemoaning the destruction of his just-retuned craft in a language I couldn't understand and I finished apologizing in a language Gormos couldn't understand, I was taken away by the Intergalactic Police to be registered as a citizen of the intergalactic community, as well as have my species and home planet logged and recorded. Taking a tip from Faeries, I lied. My home planet was listed as "destroyed" and I was registered by the bored secretary as SLOTH, FRANK – M.D. – SOLE SURVIVOR OF FEATHER RACE AND PLANET.

By the authorities, I was given:

1) a handful of intergalactic currency;

2) a week's worth of lodging at a hotel within the space station;

3) a copy of The Beginner's Guide to Intergalactic Common Tongue;

4) a torn out copy of the current day's Classifieds from "The Universe Times";

5) a cup of coffee that was more grinds than liquid

6) a rough pat on the bum to get out of their office and quit wasting their time.

Overwhelmed, I at first regretted my decision to abandon my last two comrades, preferring instead annihilation by Faerie beam. Thankfully, an unlikely Samaritan came to my rescue. Gormos had been waiting for me back at my busted escape pod, and through a series of elaborate hand gestures and somewhat disturbing body movements, he offered to assist me in adjusting to intergalactic living.

Without Gormos' help, I doubt I would've successfully navigated these new intergalactic waters successfully. After my tenure at the hotel ran out, Gormos offered me a cot in his cramped quarters.

From what I gathered from following him to work regularly (Gormos introducing me, presumably, as an 'assistant'), the muscled Kougra worked as a repairman and maintenance man to large transport ships that hauled prisoners across long expanses of space to the local maximum-security Intergalactic Penitentiary. (Apparently, someone went stir-crazy with the word 'intergalactic' when naming everything in the space station.) The close proximity of such an important prison meant there was a great deal of police influence throughout the space station. Simultaneously, it almost meant there was a great deal of rebels, whether miraculously escaped from their impoundment, or seeking to spring a buddy behind bars, or those communicating and doing business with those in the former groups.

The space station itself was enormous. I remember approaching it with my jaw slack, unable to believe its size. Built by Aishas (a species thought to be the oldest and most advanced in the galaxy—and, because everyone was an alien and the two-eared variety hadn't emerged yet, didn't require a prefix), the craft had a 3-D elliptical shape, its short ends used to anchor the ship in space while the broad sides were used as docking area. Four 'ear' towers sprung out of the top of the craft. One was used to various technological experiments, and deep space communication, while another was used as an apartment complex for the very wealthy, culminating in an extravagant penthouse in the very ear. The other two were used for various businesses, not unlike the purpose of Feather skyscrapers. The bulk of the interior ship was used for storage and government purposes. Just around the perimeter of these services, inside the ship, was a long, gray hallway of tiny apartments, all shaped with the same cube-like dimensions that just barely accommodated a bed, dresser, and a few personal items. A common bathroom was shared among every twenty rooms, which often meant upwards of forty people making a mad scramble in the morning to claim the five shower stalls. Gormos and I lived here.

While my fortuitous friendship with Gormos eased my transition greatly, the obstacles I faced were still formidable. I struggled with learning the language. Gormos, illiterate, couldn't help me with learning to read the indecipherable characters. He did, however, help me enroll in a literacy course, one he had attempted to complete on multiple occasions but always eventually felt "it wasn't worth it." (I translated this to "I really suck at learning.") In the mean time, I earned my share of the rent as a hired assistant to Gormos. Though this job was little more than watching Gormos' feet tap in time to the music on his stereo while he fiddled with the underbelly of space ships, I did learn a good deal about tools from handing them to him.

When I finally obtained a basic grasp on the language (one year for comprehension, five years for fluency), I began hunting down text books of anatomy and modern medicine in one of the bookstores contained in the space station's third earstalk. Though the alien at the counter gave me some nasty glares, I bunkered down for weeks in the mustiest corner of that shop, poring over a particular medical tome I found. It detailed the anatomy of more than a hundred different species, and from what I could make of its publication date, was fairly recent. Not only did it outline and explain the function of all basic organ systems, but it also listed common ailments in common species, and the traditional treatment for these ills.

My personal research into this new body of knowledge spanned a few decades. Fortunately, Feathers were not a short-lived species, and I was still considered fairly young on a Feather lifeline by the time I had acquired a sufficient body of knowledge to practice (while also frantically leafing through the newest medical journals to keep up with current breakthroughs). Gormos, too, retained his youth, still the burly Kougra I had first met, without a single streak of gray running through his fur.

I had switched jobs almost endlessly before I was ready to take my first dip into intergalactic medicine. I resigned from my first position after dropping a tool on Gormos' hind paw for the umpteenth time. Gormos, while nursing his throbbing paw, had calmly suggested through clenched fangs that I might consider a job that didn't require heavy lifting … or, any lifting. Embarrassed, I agreed.

The thriving black market scene seemed the most profitable to me. While I didn't have a ship or even a pilot to do cross-galaxy smuggling, and I didn't have the resources or networks to start an exchange ring of my own, I did have the limited-but-expanding talents of a rudimentary doctor. A great deal of space station citizens had no medical insurance to cover expensive procedures or medicines, or were so flat-out broke from paying expensive space station rent that they couldn't afford any procedure rates upfront. (There were also the select few who were just plain cheap.) Black market medicine was a flourishing trade, many 'freelance' doctors with makeshift pharmacies in their own squat apartments.

With Gormos and my budget already stretched nearly to its breaking point, I had to resort to alternative methods of obtaining medical supplies. I sought out a job as a nurse's assistant at the space station's hospital, and began a regiment of pocketing medical supplies. I started with tongue depressors and q-tips, progressed to latex gloves and hypodermic needles, and soon I was stealing bottles of medicine by the handful out of examination rooms. Sure, the patients were blamed, but I benefited from this as well. On their irate way out of the hospital, I very politely approached them about my 'independent practice' and gave them my card. With distrust already generated towards institutionalized medicine, most of these wronged patients were willing to give my practice a go.

Obtaining larger and more specialized equipment required a bit more finesse than the office-supplies thievery I was committing. Decked out in black scrubs, latex gloves and a ski mask (why anybody had use of a ski mask in a space station was beyond me), I snuck into the labs late at night, armed with Gormos' tool belt. Finding the proper bolt-and-tool combination took a bit of trial-and-error, but with the watchman dozing on a heavy dose of sedatives (sprinkled masterfully into his coffee while he was gabbing on the phone), I had plenty of time for such experimentation.

The lab only noticed its dwindling equipment when the defibrillator went missing. By then, I had a strong enough practice to very smoothly quit my job at the hospital. Of course, Gormos complained a bit about the size of the defibrillator, but when he found out how amusing it was to wake me up at night by applying the paddles with a low charge to my back, his complaints gradually diminished.

While the black market business was certainly lucrative, it became tiresome to meet in discreet locations, and the lease I had taken out on a second room for a pharmacy and surgical theatre began to weigh on my sporadic income. Once I felt I had a professional understanding of alien medicine and surgery, I submitted my resumé to various small—and legal—medical practices scattered throughout the hospital.

Again, my connection to Gormos saved my behind. I hadn't considered that my lack of any certified medical degree technically disqualified me from ever legitimately practicing medicine. Therefore, from the small practices I received no reply.

However, I did receive one phone call—from the Intergalactic Penitentiary. They needed a new medical examiner for annual checkups and health care of the prisoners. While on the phone, I looked over to Gormos, who gave me a toothy grin and a silent, double thumbs-up. I was in.

And that is the brief story of how I established myself as a citizen of the Alien Aisha intergalactic space station, and how I attained the miserable position of Chief of Medicine (and really, the only medical consult) at the Intergalactic Penitentiary. This story was just the prelude to a grander symphony—a grandiose composition of agony and woe. It was in this job—nearly a decade into it—that I found my destiny: shackled, snarling, and dressed in a neon orange jumpsuit.

That would be Hoshiya.


	3. In which Frank gives it up the butt

((J. Dac says: What would a fanfiction be without superfluous wings? _Really_.))

Now, I will take some time to give the listener some idea of what I looked like back then—and what Gormos looked like, as well. My physique and appearance were drastically different than they are today. By Feather standards, I was fairly average height, at five-eleven. White-skinned, red-eyed, and green-haired—Christmas-colored, though at that time there was, of course, no Christmas. I didn't much care for haircuts, and my main body of hair grew beyond my ears, which was considered rebellious to Feathers, who either preferred a crewcut or only a few inches. Most annoying was an unavoidable extreme cowlick some of my forelock crested in, the cowlick that my detractors would later use to dub me "chickenhead." I was humanoid, in the fact I resembled a human male, though without the ability to grow facial or body hair (characteristic of all Feathers). I wore glasses to correct my nearsightedness, opting out of Lasik eye surgery mostly because I didn't trust anyone but me operating on my body. At almost any time I could be caught wearing mint-green scrubs, possibly with a sweater over the top if I was feeling cold. Since I worked seven days a week with rarely any vacations or sick days (and even those days my beeper went off like a rabid Buzz—I was perpetually on call), there was really little point in owning casual clothes. I owned maybe one pair of jeans. Besides, wearing scrubs was like wearing pajamas: the ultimate in comfort wear.

What most distinguished me from humans was the set of rather obnoxious white wings that grew from either shoulder blade. Because of their lack of purpose in airless space (and the fact I could never fly with them anyway—Feathers always lacked the musculature or lightweight bones to actually fly), I kept them strapped against my back with a harness that also conveniently functioned as suspenders. Such a binding of the wings, on my Feather homeland, would've had a religious connotation. Priests and other pious individuals often bound their wings to their backs to show some sort of respect for a higher power. While I had been somewhat religious back in Feather society, with my entire population dead, I was pretty sure that any Feather higher power had expired with the bulk of His followers. Being alone turned me to atheism.

Gormos loomed over me by at least a foot. Underneath a thick coat of navy fur, blazed with black, hard muscles flexed and worked with his laborious job. He was barrel-chested, wore a leather vest full of pockets and hooks for his various tools to hang from. Though he seemed somewhat of a pushover at first, getting to know him yielded a boisterous and warm-hearted individual, always ready to unleash a booming laugh and gather you in his arms and smother you inside a furry, vice-like hug. He called himself a Kougra. I never saw any others like him wandering around the space station. He never explained the origins of his species, or his home planet. That was fine with me. Neither of us needed a third party prying into our pasts.

Hoshiya—the Space Faerie—looked quite different back then as well. I remember distinctly the first time I saw her. I was on lunch break. Gormos was still on the clock, but had turned around the security camera in his part of the hangar to avoid being nailed for taking an extra break. Gormos was going on about some ship's engine that was giving him problems again and I, as usual, was tuning him out while keeping a calculated look of concern on my face. (Every so often, I'd interject with a 'mmhmm' or 'bugger' or 'doesn't that just beat all' for good measure.)

I made hieroglyphs in the anonymous mashed hot meal with my spork, and allowed my eyes to wander briefly out the window. A line of prisoners, all uniformed in blazing orange, trailed its way into the prison gates, their procession occasionally interrupted by the foolish few who tried to make a break for it. I no longer found anything novel about new arrivals (in fact I dreaded them, because each one required a full physical, which more often than not resulted in me with a dozen bruises and a bleeding lip), so turned my attention back to what I presumed were pulverized potatoes.

"Whatcha lookin' at, Franky?" asked Gormos, having noticed my wandering eyes.

"Eh. Just scenery."

"What scenery? We live inside a space station, Frank. I mean, granted, they do what they can to make some stuff look organic, but … holy!" Gormos suddenly interrupted himself, his eyes locking onto something outside the window. I didn't pay his excitement much mind; Gormos was easily over-stimulated. On the few times we've gone out on weekends (usually we're both too exhausted from the strains of the week), I had to physically remove Gormos from nearly assaulting a dancer who dared twirling glowsticks in front of Gormos. "Franky, you gotta look at this!"

"It's _Frank_, Gormos," I sighed heavily, keeping my eyes locked on my food. "Do we have to redo the stage where I called you Gormy and you suckerpunched me and I thought I was going to be blind?"

"Fine, then, _Frank._ You gotta see this, though. They're bringin' in a girl!"

This piqued my interest. I thought at first Gormos was referring to a female of his own species, and I would finally see another Kougra. I leaned towards the window on my chair to get a better look at the long line of arrivals. Scanning the line more closely, I looked for a tall, furry creature resembling Gormos but with a bigger bust. I found no such creature—but my eyes did linger on a smaller individual, more petite than all the other new-admits. This, indeed, was a female, but by no means a counterpart to Gormos. Her head was shaved as her fellow inmates, and the synthetic light beating down on her was caught on the multiple pieces of metal pierced onto her face: septum, lip, and a whole row of loops on her ears. Those glittering earrings drew my attention to her ears, specifically—and the unmistakable tapered helix of the species that slaughtered mine.

"No way," I murmured under my breath, and turned my eyes to her back, searching for wings. There. Though she possessed aerodynamic, double-wings markedly different from the typical broad butterfly style, there they were, sprouting just from the shoulder blades. Her skin was darker than any of her species I had seen (they normally wore their skins in anemic shades, frighteningly white), but the identification was indisputable. I was looking upon a Faerie, far from her cushioned homeland.

"So tell me, Frank. Is that what your species' girlies look like? Because if so, makes me wonder why you left," came Gormos' voice, clearly emerging from around a mouthful of food. I craned my head towards him. Unsurprisingly, he had picked up my meal from where I left off, licking the plate clean with his sponge-like tongue. I reached forward and snatched the flimsy Styrofoam tray from him.

"No. Feathers are … were … all male." I inspected the tray for any remnants of food (none), and then tossed it irritably in a nearby garbage can. I stood up jauntily, a mixture of curiosity and anger locking up my limbs. "Now if you'll excuse me, _I_ actually _work_ when I'm on the clock."

As soon as I strode out of Gormos' sight, I broke into a sprint. It was incredible to me that a Faerie should be so far from Faerieland. Though they had always been in closer proximity to space, their society never expressed interest in exploring the stars—only using them as flimsy predictors for the future. This surprise mingled with an ancient anger numbed and buried under years of lonely existence in the space station. Logically, I knew she alone wasn't responsible for the death of my species. She may have been one of the many ignorant that barely noticed the decimation of the Feathers below. Even this, though, seemed a dire insult, and justly punishable. She also shared the likeness of the creatures who created and unleashed an unforgivable plague, and knowing so little about her, there was also the possibility that she, indeed, was involved in the disease's conception. At the very least, I had to see her again, closer, to confirm she wasn't just a mirage, but indeed flesh-and-blood marching into incarceration.

I didn't need to sneak any peeks at the entering prisoners, nor secretly rifle through their files later to spy her from her cell. Common admission procedure required the prisoners to go through a line of tests and inspections to ensure that they weren't carrying any weapons or drugs, or any lethal disease. The penitentiary guaranteed this by having each prisoner take a turn down a gauntlet of inspections, from a full body search by much brawnier individuals, to a full health inspection by me. (Initially, the prison hadn't provided me with guards to restrain the prisoners while I stuck foreign objects up undesirable places, claiming it was a "cost-cutting strategy." After one prisoner who had cleared the full body search with a concealed knife had nearly cut me to ribbons, the prison bucked up and paid for the guards.) My break's end had not accidentally coincided with the entrance of new inmates.

I fumbled with my keys to the inspection room, managed to get them into the lock through my waves of trembling anxiety, and entered a sickly blue-and-white tiled room, bustling with a convention of crooks. The criminals were immediately identifiable by the fact they were all stripped to their skivvies, being closely watched and occasionally manhandled by the navy-clad prison staff.

I took my place at the end of the long, narrow room, straddling the wooden stool that had been left out for me. I was flanked on either side by two brutish aliens of the same species (with a name I could barely pronounce), a species that was commonly hired for muscle work. Not surprising, considering their bodies were dominated by overdeveloped pectorals, triceps, and biceps, their head and legs disproportionately tiny. With those Herculean hands, I had seen one of those creatures crush one large diamond into many smaller diamonds like a nutcracker rending the shell of a walnut. Much to my delight, they also happened to be a species of few words, so I didn't have to tolerate endless gab like I did with Gormos.

"Good afternoon, boys," I said, nodding to the two guards. They gave simultaneous grunts in reply, which I knew to mean some kind of greeting. I leaned over to the black bag placed at my feet and began placing my equipment on the table behind me, just out of reach of any criminal who might try to turn a stethoscope into an agent of strangling. I snapped a fresh pair of latex gloves over my hands as the first prisoner approached, held by the forearm by an armed guard. The accompanying guard handed me a clipboard of information on his particular inmate. While the information was given to me as a brief medical history, I also liked taking the liberty of scanning what, exactly, my new patient was convicted for.

My first particular patron was in for double homicide. I gave him a good look up and down to determine whether I could take him if he somehow managed to commit the same act spontaneously on my two guards. He was a lanky Wyndarian, a sort of weasel-like species with four sets of arms and one main set of hind legs to balance their furry frame upon. Two prominent snaggleteeth protruded from his jaw, making his scrunched face appear all the more hideous. I motioned with a jerk of my fingers for him to step forward, placing the ear pieces of my stethoscope into my ears with the other hand.

"Alright, buddy, let's make this quick."

The checkup went swiftly, until it came to inspect his teeth. As I planted both my hands firmly on his jaw, he jerked back suddenly and attempted to take my hand off with one of those monster incisors. I used that opportunity to grab him _by_ the teeth with both hands, virtually barring him from biting me as no lower jaw could scissor upwards where I held him. He gave a piercing shriek, and the guards descended upon him, grasping him roughly by the shoulders. Holding firm to those daggers attached to his skull, I pulled him forward, staring him square in the eye. I spoke.

"Look, idiot. You're not going to bloody bite me, and if you do, my two friends here will kindly remove your arms—yes, all eight of them—from their happy home in their sockets. So I think it's rather advisable for you to cooperate, unless you want to be the only prisoner who can't put up a fist fight. And I think that'd put you at quite a disadvantage, huh, sweetheart?"

The Wyndarian immediately ceased his struggle, but the guards continued to hold him as I pried open his mouth to tap at the rotting buds of his teeth. Only the front two remained in sound condition, probably because the cocky imbecile polished them every day out of sheer pride. The sucker didn't even get the benefit of anesthesia as I yanked three teeth from their beds of squalor, tossing the blackened, bleeding nubs into a silver pan. By then the Wyndarian was rightly pissed at me again, fuming and spitting crimson saliva. With the most demeaning face I could muster, I patted him on the head and sent him off to his new life in the slammer.

As the guards attempted to take him away, he suddenly lurched backwards, straining his neck to get another shot at me. The guards help him fast, but his voice escaped to where his body couldn't go, beating at my ears. Though the lisp characteristic of Wyndarians made him sound, on the surface, quite laughable, his words penetrated the cool demeanor I carried during a standard procedure.

"You ssssshould be coming with me, misssthter doctor! You're no better than any of ussssth. I know you. I _know_ you!"

Chills danced down my nervous system, starting from the base of my skull to my toes. The certainness with which he delivered his final line lent him some eerie credibility. I would reflect upon that line repeatedly later in life, wondering if it was that moment wherein a dark door inside myself was opened, as if that sentence contained a key. There was coldness inside me that the Wyndarian had scented. Since the expiration of my fellow Feathers, my emotions seemed unable to travel the typical spectrum everyone else enjoyed. My mind denied me a true sensation of emotional closeness; even Gormos, a friend I had lived with for over half a century, remained distant inside my mind, more a pertinent chess piece than a dynamic individual. There always remained that barrier between me and others, and something in me couldn't fully acknowledge the humanity, the common agony between the exterior world and my insides. I knew apathy, the most frigid of feelings, like a real brother, and carried it around my shoulders like a cloak of protection. I vaguely discerned objective justice, able to remove myself from any situation with significant distance. The only heated emotion I knew with any proficiency was anger, and how to dole it out lavishly.

At that moment, though, I managed to shrug off the tingling sensation with alarming ease, and continued to the next patient.


	4. In which we meet the bitch

((J. Dac says: 10 points to whomever catches the "House, MD" reference.))

The majority of the physicals went according to the book, though we had a few difficult customers who didn't want a thermometer stuck up their hoohoos. (Which was sometimes unavoidable, considering many species don't have proper mouths.) Every new inmate filled me with anticipation, hoping that it would be _her_ next, and I would have the freedom to do whatever I pleased—in the name of "medicine"—to that creature that had contributed to the extinction of my people. I craned my neck to glance down the line; still I caught no glimpse of her, despite having admitted twenty or so inmates. Anxiety was beginning to itch up my spine. It made me sweat as if my whole body were incased inside suffocating latex. I could barely focus on the patients in front of me, which led to some unintentional malpractice. Luckily, my patients were in no position to sue.

The outburst occurred while I was very carefully sticking a long cue-tip down the throat of an incoming inmate with Jetsam-like rows of steak knives for teeth to test for strep. A loud shriek issued from the back of the line, and though most of the inmates and prison employees were accustomed to brief explosions of chaos, this particular shriek seemed to herald a sudden dissolution of begrudging order. It seemed to a siren song to the criminals, incensing them to strike out at their captors with collective vigor.

I pulled my arm out of the inmates mouth just in time to avoid losing it entirely. Not finished with me, my patient lurched forward with mouth wide, and for a moment I feared my last sight would be of an alien uvula, and my last words would be a childish whimper. At the last second (as if to do the maximum damage to my sanity), one guard yanked me away and the other delivered a punch straight to my patient's grill. My patient, instantly unconscious, tumbled backwards and hit the wall, where he lay incapacitated.

Catching my breath, I surveyed the scene. It seemed as if the prisoners had suddenly broken into an alarmingly organized mutiny—unlikely, considering prisoners were invariably reluctant to work together. Suspicious, I began examining individuals, trying to pick up on similarities between the enraged. My attention fell to their eyes. Although each possessed a unique set of them (sometimes more than just a couple), a common iridescent fog swirled within the centers, as if they had all been possessed by a singular consciousness. This internal smoke also happened to be cotton-candy colored, and the criminals all happened to have ridiculously childish grins on their face, as if they had been promised candy and sunshine for their efforts.

Faerie magic.

"Doctor Sloth!" a frantic voice cried over the mad fray. I craned my neck in the direction of the tangle of bodies that used to be an orderly procession. A head bobbed up periodically through the knot of movement that I recognized as my manager, combined with the strident voice. Having locked eyes with him, coming to his assistance was unavoidable.

"Crap, man, you've involved me." I sighed heavily, and leaned down to open my black bag. I pulled out a tiny vial from the neatly organized row of chemicals and a syringe and hypodermic needle from a translucent box. Affixing the needle to the syringe, I plunged the sharp tip into the rubber top of the vial, extracting a dose of sedatives enough to put down a rampaging Grarrl. I stood up and held the hypodermic needle over my head, holding my breath as I plunged into the fray.

Somehow, I managed to make it to the eye of the storm with only a few violent jabs to the ribs. In the middle of the action, five guards encircled a singular figure, who held them off with only the extension of her two hands. Her red eyes were lit up like stoplights, and a wavy air seemed to issue from her outstretched hands. It was a basic Faerie defense spell, and the guards, strangers to magic, couldn't penetrate it for their lives.

Thankfully, Feather society had offered basic defense classes against assault by Faeries. There was always a central weakness to any given Faerie spell. It took a trained eye to spot it, as it varied from Faerie to Faerie, but if one struck at it, the spell crumbled like old parchment.

Unfortunately, Feather society had been unable to find the hole in the curse that ultimately destroyed it.

"Doctor Sloth, for the love of betty, do something!" cried my manager, briefly emerging at my side, and then getting carried off again by the tide of criminal fury.

"On it, Jeff," I replied, positioning the syringe in one hand. With the other shoulder, I nudged my way into the ring of helpless guards, all beating pointlessly against apparent air. Given a full view of the spell surrounding the Faerie, I looked for a small pocket of color that indicated a weakness in power. It occurred right at her wrist, and I carefully moved along the circumference of her spell to line myself up with it. With my free hand, I plunged my fingers through the hole, clamping my hand around her delicate wrist roughly.

The spell gave a tiny sigh as it popped, and her eyes lost their supernatural light. Her head snapped towards me. The orbs of red that gave her sight flashed open in surprise for a brief second, and then narrowed spitefully. She spoke one word, not in Intergalactic Common, but the language of Feather-Faerie diplomacy.

"Feather," she spat.

"Faerie," I returned in the same language and with equal loathing, and plunged the needle upwards into her jugular. Not waiting for the burst of blood to indicate I had hit gold, I depressed the stopper and watched with suppressed glee as the chemicals drained into her. The hatred slowly drained from her eyes as the sedatives took effect, until her eyelids overtook them like a feathered curtain. She swooned in my direction, as if a part of her expected me to catch her romantically. I stepped out of the way and let her faint onto hard tile.

The criminals immediately stopped in their tracks, no longer controlled by the Faerie's spell. They looked around themselves as if unsure of their surroundings. Immediately guards were upon them. Belatedly, a crew of backup security arrived, and the criminals were corralled back into an orderly fashion. The five guards who had circled the Faerie to no affect during the peak of chaos collected the fallen Faerie, beginning to drag her away. My manager accompanied them, wiping blood with the inappropriate calmness characteristic of him from his forehead. Instead of returning to my post, I scrambled after them.

"Jeff, hold on." I reached out to touch my manager on the shoulder. He turned around and looked at me blankly, as if surprised to see me.

"Dr. Sloth. Don't you have a job to be attending to?" He meant the

"Well yeah, but … look. I've never seen her species before," I lied, indicating the Faerie with a gesture of the empty syringe in my hand. "I'm not completely positive how this sedative's going to turn out in her system. If you could put her in the hospital, in isolation … after all, she might pull a stunt like that again. You'd want me around to shoot her up a second time, wouldn't you?"

Jeff paused, letting the guards with the Faerie move ahead for a second. He looked me up and down, as if assessing my credibility. "Well, you are the doctor here …" He rubbed the side of one of his mouths. (Jeff was of an amphibian species with two toothless mouths and three eyes, not unlike a Quiggle that had been exposed to a little too much radiation. Considering that his coloration was caution-tape yellow and squealing prepubescent pink, it was a little difficult to take him seriously. The inside of my cheeks were raw from being viciously bitten to maintain a straight face.) "Who's going to inspect the inmates, then?"

"Well, routine physicals really aren't that hard, y'see," I explained. "Take the temperature, feel the glands, look in the eyes, tap the knees, _voila. _I mean, you could totally do it if you wanted to." (Not exactly the truth, but strategic lies were often necessary to get what I wanted. Thankfully, 99 of the prison was ignorant to medical procedures. That extra 1 was accounted for—me.) "Mostly it takes guts just to touch the inmates. And you got that in spades, right? And hey, if push comes to shove, most prisons give their inmates a routine physical right before they _leave_. We're really just inspecting for any diseases they may have acquired in transit. The files on each inmate should theoretically already contain anything I would pick up on a physical."

Precise flattery and talky explanation was working its social magic on Jeff. One by one, each of his eyes lost their skeptical stare and became more permissive, while the strain around each mouth loosened until assent was inevitable. Finally, he nodded. "Who'm I to argue with you, Franky?" (Nails on chalkboard. Internally, I cringed.) "I'll allow that. Guys!"

He called after the guards, who had already left us behind a considerable distance. They turned around reluctantly. "Bring that lassie to the isolation chamber in the hospital wing. Dr. Sloth will be overseeing her."

And with that subtle manipulation successful, I unknowingly circuited my life towards the shadowy fate I would someday fulfill. What if I had stayed in line and continued with the monotonous physicals, writing her appearance off as coincidence and forgiving the actions of Faeries through non-action? What if I had not loomed over her as she slept, awaiting her awakening with equal parts anticipation and anger, but instead watched her escape through some other feat of magic? What if I had continued my predictable but peaceful existence with Gormos, the silent sole survivor of a massacred species?

I don't linger on possibilities. The past remains written, and the future endlessly flexible. The fact is I stayed in that isolation chamber with her, mentally calculating how long the chemicals would keep her unconscious. The guards had shackled her to the Spartan bed inside the chamber, its mattress barely inches thick. I perched myself on the closed lid of the toilet, trying not to think about all the filth collecting on the seat of my scrubs.

For belonging to a species that had destroyed the entire existence of another, she was awfully pretty while sleeping. Some inter-species romances had occasionally existed between Feathers and Faeries in ancient children's tales, but towards the end the coexistence between the two species was largely political. I had rarely seen Faeries beside snapshots in newspapers. Now, more than a century after I thought I'd seen my last Faerie, one lay before me. Admittedly, she was, as mentioned before, unlike any of the stereotypical Faerie ideals. Her skin was a coffee-and-cream color, and I had certainly never seen Faeries with red eyes. From the stubble pushing up through her scalp, I detected hair colored azure. Her wings were blue as well, but considerably lighter. They were a color I remembered as sky blue. Though the symmetry of her face was interrupted by several piercings, the metal in her face almost served to underline certain gorgeous features. To Faeries, she may have been an abomination, outside of their standard of pale-faced, pale-haired beauty. Yet something about the exotic qualities of her complexion struck me as stunning. I hated her all the more for it.

She stirred slightly. Eyelash spasms indicated the first hints of consciousness. Slowly, slits of red showed underneath dark lashes. She turned her face towards me while waking. Her eyes had opened all the way before they registered anything, evidenced by the delayed reaction of her seeing me. As soon as I did register, however, she tried to jerk into a sitting position, kicking her legs violently and uselessly. Giving a defiant howl, she lurched upwards with her midsection, which only caused her to flop back sharply into the bed, bouncing up and down slightly with the box spring.

Before she could twitter her fingers and cast a spell, I grabbed her hands roughly, reaching across her body to seize the one closest to the wall. She lunged forward with her teeth, a vicious bite just grazing my nose. Failing that, she hacked up something from deep within her throat, and ejected it just short of my right eye.

"Filthy Feather!" she growled. "You should be dead!"

"And so should you," I answered, keeping her hands pinned down and useless as I could. She sank her nails into my skin, but I held her firm, ignoring the pain. "Faeries breathe oxygen. Albeit very little in your high altitudes, which accounts for how vacuous you Faeries are. So you're an anomaly, sweetheart. 'Cause as far as I know, Faerieland ain't producing any deep-space spaceships. Unless there's been some changes since your last genocide."

"Let me go!" she screamed, ignoring my inquiry entirely.

"No! Not until you give me some answers."

"I'm not telling a filthy Feather _anything_," she hissed. We stood at a stalemate for a moment, she unwilling to divulge information, me unwilling to release her unless she did. A brief revelation, and possibly an explanation, suddenly occurred to me. Briefly, I dropped her right hand and grasped her by the neck, turning her head sideways so I could see where her jaw line met her throat. Sure enough, an insignia was branded into her skin: a circle with a diagonal cross through it. I fingered the raised scar, and she snarled. "Get your dirty mitts off me, pervert!"

"Relax, sweetheart, I'm not interested in an exile," I sneered, snapping my hand back so it kept her other hand down. Her shoulders tensed visibly. I smiled with smug satisfaction. "I'm no Faerie anthropologist, but I know enough about your culture to know what marks an invalid. You took to space because you didn't have anywhere else, right? Wonder how you made it this far with no air."

"I don't _need_ air, idiot," she hissed. "I'm no common cattle Earth Faerie, or some run-of-the-mill Light Faerie. I'm an _original_."

"And that's why they didn't want you, huh? Couldn't fit in with their conformity, so you decided to rebel. But you _want_ to be just like them, don't you? You'd give anything for that, right?" I asked mockingly.

"That's no business of yours, filthy Feather. And you're one to talk about conformity. Look at your wings, bound up like meat. You think that's gonna get you to heaven?"

"That's completely irrelevant. I have no God."

The stalemate re-ensued. A silent battle of wills waged between us, until she spoke, a slight shred of hatred withdrawn from her tone.

"Then we've got one thing in common, Feather."

"Tell me why you're out here."

"I'll tell you if you let me go."

"If I let you go, you'll use that magic of yours to attack me."

"Maybe. Maybe not. Guess you're gonna have to risk that, huh?" I examined her expression closely, trying to detect the slightest flicker of deceit. Though our faces were similar, Faeries and Feathers used each muscle differently to express certain sentiments. Reading her face was like reading Intergalactic Common for the first time: completely foreign. It would be a leap of faith to trust her.

"… Okay. I'll let you go. But I swear, Faerie, you start chanting one spell, I'll hit you with a tranquilizer so fast it'll make your head spin."

"Fine. Just get your paws off me."


	5. In which Frank gets screwed over take 1

((J. Dac: Just want to give everyone a head's up—whether or not I finish this fic is really a matter of chance/time. While I do have summer break coming up, that's going to be chock full of working to pay off college debts. On top of that, I'm eighteen now and trying to forge a path to being a writer early … which means getting serious about my original material, and sending it in for serious readings. (Whatever 'serious' means. I sound so grave and silly.) I've got about ten more solid parts after this one, so there should be no slow down of output at the moment. I know how this fic is supposed to continue/end past where I've written, so at the very least, once I'm done putting the remainder of this up I could give you an idea of what would've happened.

Anyway, back to the fic.))

I paused, and then released her hands, holding up my own as I backed away. I retreated back to the toilet, opening my black bag and preparing a second dose of tranquilizer as promised. She, too, appeared to be keeping her end of the bargain. No magic glittered at her fingertips—no ancient language traveled down her tongue. Her eyes never stopped following me around the room.

"Yes, I'm an exile," she began slowly. "An 'invalid.' I'm not a criminal, though."

"Your uniform begs to differ."

"Do you want to hear me out or not?" she snapped. I gestured with a roll of my eyes for her to proceed. "I'm not a criminal in _Faerieland_, I meant. That's not what earned me the mark. I was exiled because I was neither Earth, Water, Air, Light, Fire, nor Dark faerie. Exiled because they couldn't rightly pin me, and they were scared of my magic."

"Yes, well. Faeries don't tend to stand for things they fear very long," I said sarcastically.

"Hush. I was exiled to a dark cloud, far from Faerieland. I couldn't stay there. I hate being caged. So I decided to try my luck in space. Big black expanse, I figured it couldn't be much worse or suffocating than Faerie prejudice. Turns out I could breathe there—could travel there quite a bit faster than I could in oxygen, too. So I packed some food, and made a break for it. That was fifty years ago."

"A little under twenty years after I left."

"Yeah. I guess after there were no more Feathers to blame, Faeries had to start turning looking inward to find imperfections. And they found me."

"Boohoo," I replied dryly. "At least you have some semblance of a home to return to."

"What home?" she snapped. "Better to have no home at all than one that you're barred from returning to. It's always there, _mocking_ you."

"Cut it, Faerie. I'm not interested in your self-pitying diatribes."

"My name's Hoshiya, not Faerie. Stop calling me that."

"And my name's Dr. Frank Sloth, not Filthy Feather."

"Ugh. You Feathers and your ugly names."

"You Faeries and your ridiculous names," I retorted blandly. "So tell me, what wound you up here?"

"Well, it's sort of difficult to find a legitimate job when you barely speak the language of the universe," she replied bitterly, clearly remembering some wound inflicted upon her in the past. "Maybe _you_ might've had an easier time making your way because you're a _male_, but when you're clearly female, your options are somewhat reduced." The bitterness in her voice increased twofold with this comment, and her eyes blazed upon me accusingly. I rolled my eyes, looked around the room briefly for any recording device, and then leaned in close for a confession.

"Are you kidding me, sweetheart? I had just as much difficulty as you did. And yeah, I had a few stints meddling with illegal activities. But for the love of betty, I didn't get _caught_. And that's got nothing to do with what gender I happen to be."

"Well, maybe as a _guy_ you can practice some black market medicine, _Doctor_ Frank," she sneered. "But females, our options are limited. I had to choose between reckless, beaten harlot or on-the-run assassin." She smirked. "I chose the latter. And that's all I have to tell you, Dr. Frank."

Her story apparently finished, she fell silent, turning her gaze towards the wall. I watched her for a long while, arms crossed over my chest and the fingers of one hand fondling the stopper of the syringe. Briefly, I gnawed on the thumbnail of my left hand, and then unfolded my arms and pointed at her sharply.

"I don't believe it."

"What's there not to believe?" she demanded.

"I don't believe why you left. I believe that you're an outcast, and I believe that you had to take a dangerous job once you were out in the universe. But you're omitting something."

"And what makes you think that?"

"Your eye lids. They give you away. You were blinking too much when you were talking about leaving Faerieland. You left because you didn't want to be there anymore, yeah, but there's another part of the story. I bet if I got a lie detector on you during that part of your story, the needle would be tearing up the chart."

She smirked, turning her head back towards me. "You're a clever one, Dr. Frank."

"Dr. Sloth. That's my surname. If a Faerie can even understand that."

"With every pointless insult you get yourself further and further away from your answers," she replied dryly.

"We're never going to like each other, Hoshiya. I'm over it, personally. But I think you left because you're looking for something. And fifty years later, you still haven't found it. And hey, I'm interested in what has you so desperate to find it that you're willing to take a despicable job. So here's your confessional. Have at it."

I crossed my legs in a gesture suggesting I had time to waste waiting for her to blurt out the truth. She looked at me a long time, perhaps mentally gauging whether or not I was willing to wait out her admission. Finally, she let loose a sigh of aggravation, and turned her sight back to the wall.

"Fine. The Faerie Queen … she promised me that if I bring back a vial from … a vial of water from the Fountain of Youth, I would be readmitted into Faerie society."

Another long silence occurred between us—but this time it was broken by my uncontrollable laughter, which I had only managed to stifle for the few pregnant seconds that the room had remained quiet. Sniffing indignantly, she turned her head away from me.

"I shouldn't've expected a Feather to understand the significance of such a magical element."

"That's because it's ludicrous, sweetheart," I managed to choke out between spats of laughter that literally overwhelmed me. "There's no such thing as a Fountain of Youth. We as Feathers and Faeries are fortuitous to have the long lifespan our bodies grant us, spanning centuries at a time. But like anything else, we _have_ to expire. It's just a natural part of life. The cells stop reproducing, start atrophying … the body erodes, life its battering stream. There's nothing you can do to prevent that, short of expanding your life through medical means. And even that has a limit."

"Ah, your Feather medicine," she sneered dismissively. "It's putting those limits on your worldview. Death isn't inevitable. Death, with strong magic, can be cured, just like any other sickness."

"But death _isn't _a sickness. It's a natural process, like growing up. The bloom of the pituitary glands, the shaping of a mature adult body. Death is just another stage."

"Magic doesn't have to make those distinctions."

"Alright. Alright, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, for the sake of this conversation. My question is, what makes you so sure this Fountain of Youth can be found in the universe? Did the Faerie Queen give you a map or something? X-marks-the-spot and all that jazz?"

"Yes."

The confidence in her monosyllabic answer hit me unprepared. Though my assumptions about her as a Faerie discredited the validity of anything she strongly believed in, the assertion with which she backed that one word came at me like a punch to the bread basket. With that shock, she planted something else inside me, something far more potent than any physical blow: curiosity.

I leaned forward, the amusement evaporating from my voice. "Humor me, Hoshiya. Where does this map point to?" A sinister smile stretched across her face, making her eyes narrow naturally. She gave a slow, 'come-hither' motion with her forefinger. Automatically I leaned closer, my interest outweighing my common sense. That was my second mistake.

My first mistake was not recognizing the hand motion as something more than a mere indicator to come closer—namely, the opening movements of a Faerie spell. As soon as I came within three feet of her, she extended her fingers violently in my direction, barking a few choice phrases in another tongue. Two tendrils extended from both hands, spiraling around one another as they made their short trip towards me. Before I could stab the syringe down and let loose another wave of sedatives upon her system, the braid of magic grasped me by the hand. It penetrated my palm and, like a Hissi entering a hole in the ground, slithered inside of me, wriggling its tail as it completed its entrance.

Without thinking, I dropped the syringe to grasp my hand. The clink of glass couldn't drown out my loud curses, slightly from the wasted chemicals, but mostly from the unidentified spell that just usurped my body.

Turning away from my hand for a moment, I pounced onto Hoshiya, grasping her by the collar of her jumpsuit. Despite my aggressive actions, a smirk remained plastered on her face. Clearly, she had succeeded in something. "What did you just do, Faerie?!" I demanded, shaking her savagely. "What bloody curse did you just put into me?!" She allowed her head to flop about indiscriminately, letting her eyes fall to her hands cuffed to the bed frame.

"You won't be the last Feather for long, Dr. Frank," she said quietly. The small, malicious smile she directed at her side nearly paralyzed me; at the very least, I dropped her clothing and backed away, the dread of possibility rising in my stomach. Visions of the mutated and brutal deaths of my colleagues and family cycled through my head at a frantic pace. I held up my hand to defray the anxiety rendering my limbs immobile—but there was a mark, new to the landscape of my skin: olive green, like a rash or a sinister stigmata.

And then, she began to writhe. A convulsion caved her chest inwards, and she gave a low moan of pain. Her hands curled into claws, and attempted to reach and massage her chest, but they were stopped short by the restraints. "Chest …" she managed to gasp out, and buried her head backwards in her pillow, eyes squeezed shut. Emitting low groans that slowly escalated into full-blown screams, she continued to squirm about in the bed uncomfortably.

I knew what was happening to her, and watched on in morbid fascination. The symptoms were classic female heart attack, and left unattended, she would pass out and likely perish. If I wanted it, the defibrillator could be in her cell in minutes, and she would stand a chance of surviving. It would take a single call. If I stayed where I was, observing her struggle to catch her breath and somehow still the blinding agony, the massive cardiac event would take its course. Her heart would stop—the valves would quiet, and her blood cells would come to a standstill, eternal rush hour traffic.

Vengeance. Moments before, she had poisoned me, placing the same plague that had wiped out my species less than a century earlier (a fact I would find out later). She had written my death sentence with a few jerks of her fingers, without a pen. Granted, she gave me a less aggressive form—a strain that would conquer me slowly, creeping up my skin like a green glacier, twisting me like time twists an old house: gradually. And she, she belonged to the race that abolished my brothers, my father, my family. Could my taste for revenge be quenched by sacrificing her life? Could that prison mattress be the altar on which my hatred and suffering was repaid?

No.

She grew limp. Medically, she was dead.

My instincts as a doctor overcame me, and I rushed to the door of the cell, unbolting it as quickly as I could with my shaking hands. "Inmate is coding. Get me a defibrillator in here immediately!" I shouted to the guard immediately outside the door. He blinked at me momentarily, and then began speaking into his walkie talkie. I went back into the room, and repeated my request into a black intercom that connected directly to the main switchboard of the penitentiary.

In no time, there were two guards rolling a defibrillator into the room. In no time, the plug was in the outlet and her arms removed from the handcuffs, and her jumpsuit ripped open to the midsection to reveal her unmoving chest. In no time, I held two paddles charged with the power to restart her life, remove her from the long dark tunnel where light loomed on the other end.

One on the heart, one on the side—and the current, running inanimate from the power plant's generator to travel across a once-living organ and lend it a second life. The lifeless reviving the once-living; it never failed to astound me. And here was the brutality of life most apparent: it lurched the revived inches off her bed, her consciousness coming back into her body like a shot. Magic might bind the soul to the body, but medicine maintains that link, and when need be, brings it back.

It is a process of remarkable violence; it is a process of remarkable beauty.


	6. In which blackmail is the best medicine

I gave her the physical she dodged earlier by her interruption of the line. Sure enough, the cause of the heart attack—typical: athersclerotic plaque build up in an epicardial coronary artery which caused a near-fatal arrhythmia—was something I could've at least predicted by various indicators and obvious lifestyle choices. (While I couldn't get a verbal medical history out of her, as she was unconscious, the tattoos decorating her body told vivid, and somewhat vulgar, stories of life-threatening, high-stress experiences.) Removal of the dead heart tissue would be necessary, but thanks to the severity of the clot, removing dead tissue would involve removing most of the heart. It was a miracle, in fact, that the defibrillator had even managed to get the bloody thing beating again. Thankfully, the prison had just enough money to squeeze out the funds for a state-of-the-art mechanical heart. (There is one thing I will say about the intergalactic community: the pooling of multiple medical techniques from multiple species has resulted in medicine far more advanced than any I had ever seen.)

Naturally, I got plenty of guff for putting such advanced technology into the chest of a convicted criminal. Hoshiya wasn't up for capital punishment, though, so the argument couldn't be made that the heart was going to _absolute_ waste.

Mostly, I ignored the ethical gripers. For my own purposes, I needed Hoshiya alive. Though she was the one who had cursed me, she also held the keys to the cure. Magic couldn't be fixed by medicine; thousands of Feathers throughout history who had had unfortunate mishaps with Faerie magic had tried to rid it via Feather methods, always to result in failure. I was dependent on Hoshiya if I wanted to lift the curse. Every time I flashed my palm upwards I was faced with a chilling reminder: the mark.

Post-op, I flushed her system with immune-suppressants so her body wouldn't frantically attack the foreign, synthetic organ. She slept fitfully through the night—I know because I sat next to her with two large cups of coffee, anxiously awaiting her awakening for the second time in two days. When dawn approached, the door to her room creaked open; I spun around defensively, my nerves wired with caffeine.

"You're not authorized to be in here!" I shouted reactively. I could practically feel the purple bags tugging at the underbelly of my eyes.

"Relax, Franky, it's me." The hulking figure I had assumed to be hostile in the doorway transformed into the silhouette of Gormos as he entered the room. He squinted his eyes against the slits of sunlight bleeding into the room through the shades. Graciously, he positioned himself in front of the window so I didn't have to visor my own eyes, his back to the sun. "I heard about the debacle down in admissions. When you weren't home at twelve, I figgered you had a late night surgery. Figured you'd stay by the patient, like the good surgeon you are. Brought you breakfast." He held out a plate piled with limp pancakes over Hoshiya's body, a spork protruding from the stack like a white plastic flag. I took the plate from him. I lifted the top pancake suspiciously, where the bite marks of a very big mouth were clearly visible. Through the missing pancake, I gazed up at Gormos skeptically. Gormos' face shifted in the Kougra equivalent to blushing: whiskers turned downwards, one incisor revealed sheepishly. "Heh, sorry buddy. Got a little hungry on the way over."

"The cafeteria is only one flight above the medical wing," I said dryly.

"Hey, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, huh?" He reached behind him and pulled up the chair to Hoshiya's bed that was directly behind him, sitting down with a loud exhalation. Slowly, I began dividing the pancakes into pieces with my spork, supporting the plate on Hoshiya's stomach for lack of table. "That's right, Frank. You _show_ that unconscious girl how professional our prison's doctor can be," Gormos said sarcastically, leaning back in his chair.

"Oh, hush up. She owes me her life. The least she can do to repay me is lend me her washboard abs for surface area," I replied, sticking some pancake in my mouth. "By the way, why'd you skimp on the syrup?"

"Figured this was supposed to be a clean area or something."

"Nah. Once you're out of the operating theatre, sterility's out the window. Hence the frequency of hospital acquired illness."

"That's reassuring."

"Hey, you want me to lie to you?" I asked, cramming my mouth full of pancakes. I stabbed a particularly large slice of pancake just shallow enough to hurl it across the room, and readied it like a catapult. "Mouths up, Gormos." He leaned back, opening his enormous maw, revealing a set of teeth comparable to cabinet of knives. Sticking my tongue out in the interest of concentration, I aimed the pancake for the sizeable target. Still, Gormos had to lurch forward to catch it on his extended tongue.

"No dice, Frank," Gormos said, licking his chops.

"I'm getting better," I replied defensively.

"Still not gonna be using the laser cannons on my ship anytime soon," Gormos snorted, and leaned back in his chair, supporting the back of his head with his paws. He allowed me to eat in comfortable silence until his inquisitive and chatty nature overcame him, as it always did. "Can't help but noticing you're sitting around an awful lot for this lassie, Frank. I've known you for a while, and for you, being so attention and … well, showing some caring ain't standard procedure. Also can't help but noticing the two of you share a remarkable resemblance. You related or something?"

"Told you, Gormos, I'm the only one left from my species," I answered, tonguing the plate to recover remaining crumbs. "And never, _never_ suggest I in any way resemble a Faerie. Ugh." I folded the plate by snapping my hand closed. "Faeries and Feathers are enemies. Well, were enemies. I guess the adversity only exists between Faeries and me now. She looks all pretty and harmless now, but she's got a whopper of a temper. Not to mention she belongs to the species that destroyed mine."

"Then why save her?" Gormos asked, raising one furry eyebrow. "I mean, not that I'm a fan of revenge or anything. Think it's kinda pointless. But for you, I mean, this just isn't your style."

"S'not. Unfortunately, she left me with a little present before passing out." I transferred the plate to my free hand and held out my infected left palm for Gormos to see. Gormos reeled back instinctively, and then rocked forward to get a closer look.

"Jeez-loo-weez. What _is_ that thing?"

"A symptom of the disease that wiped out my species. It's peculiar, though. I got this about twenty-four hours ago, and the darn thing hasn't spread. By this period in the infection, most Feathers were experiencing multiple system failures … not to mention the external consequences. Either she didn't complete the curse, or she was too weak to put a potent form in me. In any case, she and I need to have a little chit chat about what this is gonna mean for our … relationship."

"Just 'cause you saved her life, Frank, don't mean she's going to save yours. She's in the slammer for manslaughter, right? Bounty hunter? Assassin? Doesn't matter. Both're scum. It's just too bad she didn't slit your throat, 'cause this method might be longer."

"You're so good at being a comfort, Gormos," I said sarcastically, looking up at him darkly. "Thing is, it doesn't matter whether or not she wants to cure me. See, Faeries, being of a magical race, are bound by certain laws. Laws I'd almost forgotten over these years, but came back to me like a flash of inspiration while I was removing her blasted heart. Karmic law is especially valued in magical law. Bet every time this chick takes out another target, she has to offer some kind of bodily sacrifice to make up for her sins. Explains a lot of her tattoos, and scars." I lifted up her covers so Gormos could view a particularly detailed tattoo of an alien creature, clearly done by an amateur hand. "Because I saved her life, she has to offer me something equal in return. And since I gave her the ultimate gift—life—she's basically bound to do whatever I say. Like unleashing a genie from its prison, and receiving three wishes. Only I doubt this ice queen'll give me more than one."

"That's the first thing you've been right about, Dr. Frank."

Her voice floated up to me like an ancient monster giving its first garbled roars after hibernation. Gormos and my attention immediately snapped down to the delicate Faerie practically absorbed by the pillows and linen of the hospital med, built large to accommodate patients of all sizes.

It must've been surreal to her—a Faerie accustomed to magical cures waking up in a room outfitted for modern medicine. While it was considerably darker than most hospital rooms due to its situation inside a prison (the space station hospital at least attempted to simulate light—it was thought to be conducive to the healing process), it was still the standard setup for a Standard Intergalactic Integrated Medical room: television hanging from the wall opposite the bed (nonfunctional), door with medical charts to the bed's right, various medical posters plastered on the eggshell walls (including the classic pain gradient from beaming one to tortured ten), bed with reclining functions and call button (plus wrist and ankle restraints for the convicted criminal in your medical practice, her hands strung up in small black bags to prevent her from casting further magic), an IV to the bed's left dripping a constant stream of chemicals into the patient, telemetry ticking off the time of a mechanical heart to the right of the bed, and (of course) the sterile-sweet air of sickness and ennui.

"What happened?" she murmured, unable to muster the strength to make a stronger assertion. She attempted to reach for the IV on her arm to pull it up—came up short from the restraint on her arm, and leaned forward to remove it with her mouth. Easily, I pushed her head back with my hand.

"Take it easy, tiger," I said, sticking the fork in my mouth to fulfill an oral fixation. "You're on a whole boat-load of immuno-suppressants. Inhale the wrong bug now, and you're guaranteed to get infected. And for the time being, you'll probably have a pretty sever fever and some sort of swelling." I turned her head towards me with my healthy hand, holding her cheek so she couldn't look away. The other hand I thrust in her face, five fingers splayed and nearly rubbing the mark in her face. "Now, let's discuss a little something."

"Forget it, Feather," she said, retreating her head as far as she could. It had the effect of crumpling her chin to create a tiny dulap, collapsing her jawline. "I put that curse on you for a reason. I'm finishing the job the Faerie Queen couldn't."

"And who _exiled_ you, you idiot? Jeez. For an assassin, you have an awfully ignorant attachment to loyalty," I snarled. "And the only reason we're even having this conversation is because _I_ saved your _life_. You know that little pressure in your chest?" I dug the index finger of my healthy hand into her chest. She winced in pain, and I returned my hand to her cheek. "Wasn't just a little heartburn, honey. 'Fraid you had a bit of a myocardial infarction, killed most of your heart tissue. Know what's serving as your ticker right now? A heart I ordered for you, and got a lot of crap thrown at me for putting _into_ you. So let's see—I manned the defibrillator that restarted your heart. Then, I put the heart into you that's going to keep you being a flighty, ditzy Faerie until the end of time. So I'd say you owe me one favor. One veeeeeeery big favor. At least."

She studied my face, glaring through my fingers to where my features fixed themselves into a determined expression. Gormos watched on, a blinking spectator not willing to get caught between the crosshairs of two mortal enemies. Jerkily, she turned her head, escaping the grasp of my healthy hand.

"It's slow-acting. I wasn't powerful enough to cast the complete curse on you. It will destroy you, though," she said stiffly. I sighed in exasperation.

"You didn't answer the question, sweetheart. Although it was really more of an imperative statement than interrogative. They teach you sentence structure in Faerie school, or just evasion?" I asked.

"I wasn't powerful enough to put the full curse on you, and I'm not powerful enough to lift it," she snapped, moving her head so she could stare into my eyes. The truth burned in those two pupils embedded in scarlet irises. It hadn't struck me until then that we shared an eye color. Though seemingly meaningless, the revelation hit me like a wall of water, along with her startling confession. "The curse was made so that only the Faerie Queen could lift its effect."

I swallowed. Upon remembering ancient Faerie magic laws, I had thought the curse would be cured immediately upon her awakening. That glimmer of hope had carried me through the long night far more effectively than the coffee chugged every hour. In an instant, she had smothered that light. The inside of me felt dark and cold, though not with the hollow sense of apathy. The cold was piercing. Acute fear: it ran through me like a charge, lifting every hair on my body in terror.

Gormos, as always, ruined the self-pitying atmosphere I had created (so comfortable to languish within) by speaking. "So what's the big deal? Can't we just find this Faerie Queen and ask her to lift it?"

Both Hoshiya and my heads snapped over to Gormos in surprise, having almost forgotten he was in the room. "And who are you, furball?" she demanded, visibly ruffled.

"Name's Gormos. I'm a Kougra." He extended a paw in a friendly gesture before remembering her hands were tied down. Sheepishly, he drew back his hand. "Uh, anyway. I'm Frank's friend, and I really wouldn't like to see him go out any time soon. So, maybe you could tell us how to find this Faerie Queen, or … something."

Gormos' cluelessness might've been endearing had the situation not been so dire. I pressed my fingers to my temples, giving them a deep-tissue massage to stem the headache that brewed in the blood vessels. "I don't need to know how to find the Faerie Queen. I know where she is. She's … hovering above my home planet like a … like a wasp, with her little wasp colony of Faeries." Gormos blinked stupidly.

"I thought you said everyone on your planet was gone, Frank," he said slowly.

"They _are_," I said impatiently, "but there's a _separate_ species, Faeries, to which Hoshiya here belongs, who live _above_ my home planet. Who also happen to be responsible for the untimely demise of my species." I shot a hateful look down at Hoshiya, who stuck out her tongue, revealing a stud in the shape of a skull.

Gormos picked at the fuzzy inside of his ear with his foreclaw extended. "Well, jeez, man, you never told me that. Some sixty years of living together and you think you know a guy. _Jeez_." There was a note of hurt in Gormos' voice that made me bristle like a husband detecting his wife's reluctance to clearly identify what was bothering her.

"Oh come on, Gormos, this is not the time to gripe about our communication problems," I groaned, pulling my hands down my face. "The point is, I can't go back to Faerieland because I'm a Feather, and they'll shoot me down on sight, like they did my entire species. Hoshiya here can't go back because she's an exile, unless …."

And that's when a new dawn excited my hope, rekindling that fledgling flame that I thought had permanently expired. That one 'unless,' that single clarification, had reopened a path to salvation, bypassing the dismal road to destruction I had stared down moments earlier. I snapped my fingers in delight, and then pointed at Hoshiya powerfully.

"Ok, this is going to happen. Give me that map you were telling me about before you started writhing around on that containment bed. Gormos and I will find that … well, whatever the Faerie Queen wants found, and then we'll bring it to her. Then _she'll_ owe me a favor."

"No longer so skeptical, are we, Frank?" Hoshiya sneered.

"Desperate times call for desperate measures," I said with a shrug, and then motioned with my fingers for her to hand over the map. "Now make with the map, sweetheart. Gormos and I don't have much time."

"I don't remember agreeing to this!" Gormos called from the sidelines. I ignored him.

"It's useless, Frank. The map is made for Faerie hands, and Faerie eyes. If it's touched by a foreigner's hands, it will turn to dust, and then it will do nobody any good. If it's read by a foreigner, it will read like jibberish. It's only useful in Faerie hands."

"No problem," I said coolly, and by the expression on her face, she clearly didn't expect this response. "We've got a Faerie right here, now don't we? You'll be our interpreter."

"What in the Faerie Queen's name do you think is going to compel me to help a Feather like you?" she demanded, her eyebrows turned down over her eyes.

"Simple, sweetie—you owe me." I reached out with my infected hand and slowly stroked the area just above her heart. The way she attempted to escape my caress, her face twisted with disgust, was absolutely priceless.

"Forget it, Feather! I'm not helping you!" she shouted, her whole body struggling to get away from my hand.

"That so, sweetheart? Well, let me show you something." I walked to the other side of the bed to the telemetry equipment, and picked up a tiny remote placed on top of the machine. It was of an oval shape, with several colored buttons arranged in a vertical row on its face. I held the remote in front of her face so she could see it clearly. "Give a good long look to this little remote, Hoshiya. It's the predictor of your fate. See, these little buttons control the speed of that heart ticking away in your body. Since it's not organic, it doesn't know how to do it on its own. And since we were giving such a valuable piece of equipment to a convicted criminal, the manufacturers were so kind as to add on a button that covered our butts in case this bionic inmate made any attempt to escape." I let my thumb hover over and fondle the red button at the very bottom of the row. "One push of this baby, and your borrowed time is up." Hoshiya tried to maintain a collected demeanor, but her face drained of its color, leaving her almost as white as a typical Faerie.

"Are you trying to blackmail me, Dr. Frank?" she asked, keeping her voice low so I couldn't detect a tremble. I heard it anyway.

"Just doing what I have to to say alive," I answered calmly.

A struggle raged just below her facial features, making her face distort and twist into ugly shapes. Finally, the internal battle seemed to have a victor, and she looked away from me. "Fine," she said quietly, so quietly that I could barely hear her. "I'll help you."


	7. In which bad poetry reigns supreme

((J. Dac says: Now you all have the privilege of seeing why I write prose and not poetry.))

Relief washed over me in waves. I was afraid, at first, that she would be resistant to the end, and she would call my bluff on stopping her heart. My poker face prevailed, and now I had a final, definitive shard of hope to which to cling.

Though the prison had only lent me the remote to Hoshiya's mechanical heart temporarily because I would be attending to her directly, I stuck it in my pocket. For the time being, I had no plans of returning the device, and I was fairly confident I wouldn't be employed by the prison for very long. After all, in order to use Hoshiya as a translator for the map, I would need to break her out of the prison, and I was pretty sure the prison wouldn't look too highly on one of their employees who helped an inmate escape.

I crafted the escape plan quickly, after confirming the existence of the map by having Hoshiya show it to me. (Apparently she stored the thing in her ear, and when I took off the restraints to one of her hands, I couldn't imagine why she was reaching for her ear instead of pointing me in an appropriate direction to find it. It was a bit like a clown performing the old coin-out-of-the-ear trick, though of course her magic didn't involve slipping anything down a baggy sleeve. Indeed, it was written in jibberish, but it looked authentic enough, and if Hoshiya was lying, I had the means to take her out with a single press.) Gormos was dragged into the fiasco, half because he had already been witness to my scheming and it was better not to leave him behind to spill the beans, half because he owned his own ship, and half because I couldn't imagine a life in outer space without him. (Of course, I didn't and would never admit to the grossly sentimental and superfluous last half.)

To ensure the Faerie wasn't going to go back on her promise, I forced her into a blood bond, something I knew to be unbreakably sacred to Faeries. With a switchblade borrowed from Gormos, we carved twin pentagrams into our palms and pressed the two dripping diagrams together. Her blood, like most Faeries, was a washed-out yellow, mine a dark red. The two colors combined in a single orange drop, staining the hospital sheets. She grimaced at the stain unhappily, tracing its edges with her free hand.

"See its shape? It foretells misery," she proclaimed.

"Save it for your psychic hotline," I sneered.

I planned the escape like this: I would authorize Hoshiya's release from the hospital wing and would supposedly sedate her so I could transfer her in a wheelchair without the aid of any guards. While I would superficially handcuff her to the wheelchair, I would leave her fingers unrestrained so she could cast magic—nothing destructive, but something persuasive to get past guards. Meanwhile, Gormos would gather our belongings and sneak back into work (he had been on the clock all while visiting me, unsurprisingly), and make sure there was a clear, inconspicuous, pedestrian path to his ship. We would sneak on the ship (taking the wheelchair with us—I wanted at least one souvenir of my career as an intergalactic doctor), and hopefully depart without being detected as suspicious, under the space station assumption that Gormos was taking his newly-tuned craft for a test run.

Then we would jump into hyperdrive and make a smooth escape to our first destination.

The hardest part of planning, in fact, hinged upon figuring out what areas of space we should first explore. The map, as it turned out, was less of a map and more of an epic poem, filled with discreet symbolism and secret codes to ensure that the ordinary mind couldn't utilize the directions. Hoshiya, in the possession of the map for half a century, had failed to decipher a single line of the poem, had resorted to wandering, and through an unfortunate string of events, ended up where we found her. She barely needed the words to recite the poem: it seemed to be imprinted on her heart from reading it repeatedly.

Upon speaking the poem's words, Hoshiya's voice seemed to smooth out, losing the gruff, mercenary quality she used with me. It was almost pleasant-sounding.

The poem went as follows:

_Listen, Faerie mum and child,_

_Listen now and listen well—_

_Listen, Faeries sweet and mild_

_For the pathway to the well._

_The strong who seek eternal life_

_Must gather these things four:_

_Mirror, brick, feather, and knife;_

_Sight, screen, color, and war._

_Sight will not come from the eyes_

_But from those who can listen._

_In the hall where the lady cries,_

_The mirror waits, and glistens._

_Screen will be found in a belt_

_That girds a waist with rock._

_A waist where deadly things are smelt:_

_A warring, uprising block._

_Color will be from the crown_

_Of a beauteous beast._

_Long in darkness, light in down_

_On Faerie flesh it feasts._

_War will be found where one keeps _

_A thousand secrets stored._

_In dark and chambered caverns sleeps_

_That dismal blood-stained sword._

_Combine the four with royalty_

_At thy weary side._

_Cling fast to thy loyalty:_

_Hearts this potion divides._

_Drink of its wine and live thy life_

_For all eternity—_

_And dodge the tumult and the strife_

_Within modernity._

"Did the Faerie who wrote that have any concept of meter?" I asked acidly after Hoshiya had finished her recitation. She glared at me spitefully, and didn't reply.

Immediately, Gormos and I began putting our heads together to decipher definite locations from the poem's vague allusions. "The first has got to be referring to Aishas," I said, pounding down my fist on my marked had with determination. "I mean, who can listen better than a species with six ears? There's no other species that exceeds that many hearing units. Gormos, you know stuff about the Aisha home world. Is there a hall with a depressed lady somewhere?"

"Uh, well, we could check the Sacred Cavern," Gormos suggested, pulling on his whiskers in thought. "It's a bit of a holy shrine for Aishas, but they do let tourists get a glimpse. We might have to twist some arms to get _in_, though. Rumor has it some royal Aisha died there ages ago waiting for her lost love, and her ghost haunts the Sacred Cavern cryin' its little eyes out."

"Alright. That's the first place we'll head, then. What about this brick? I'm pretty sure they're referring to an asteroid belt, but the only one I can think of is uncivilized," I said, tugging at the tips of my hair. "You know, the one circling the Delta-Phi solar system."

"We should … still check there," Gormos said slowly, as if reluctant to heed my suggestion. "We might find something interesting." I looked over at him with a raised eyebrow, suspicious of his tone. Gormos held his paws up defensively, though his eyes didn't have the typical, innocent don't-look-at-me shimmer to them he normally used. "That's all I'm sayin' for sure."

"Alright, then let's make Delta-Phi our principle stop for the brick … and maybe by then, Gormos will be able to say _something_ for sure," I said sarcastically, giving Gormos a nasty look. "Color is totally obvious." Gormos and I exchanged looks, and pointed twin finger-guns at one another.

"Flesh-Eatin' Phoenix!" we said together, and then proceeded to gnaw on our right forearms.

"What does that even mean?" Hoshiya asked, barely concealing the anxiety that the phrase caused her.

"Oh, just a little in-joke. We had an inmate come in here once who tried to get a little 'color' himself from the Flesh-Eating Phoenix. Which is basically this huge monster that's only called a phoenix 'cause it has colored feathers and grows back whatever you shoot off it with a laser. Nobody really knows how it got where it is, but the Flesh-Eating Phoenix and a black hole kind of sandwich a big intergalactic black market trade route, so smugglers usually wind up tusslin' with the Phoenix to avoid getting sucked into the hole," Gormos explained.

"Kind of a Charybdis-or-Scylla situation," I elaborated.

"Anyway, this inmate—while smuggling—somehow it in his tiny head that the feathers of this beastie were valuable, which they're not. Wound up losin' an arm and other essential bits and pieces," Gormos said mischeviously. "Totally crazy, too. Came in waving his stumps around, screaming about the beastie."

"Yeah, funny for you, not funny for the doctor deluging him with antipsychotic meds," I mumbled, rolling my eyes in remembrance. "Anyway, forget the Phoenix for now. What about this last one? The knife? Know any dark, beating caves?"

"Um, not beating. Things made out of rock tend not to beat very much," Gormos said in utter seriousness. "But, it might be talking about a black hole."

"A good idea, but I'm not sure how much a black hole pulsates. Maybe a pulsar?"

"Maybe, but pulsars are bright, not dark, and I really wouldn't want to approach one too closely, unless I wanted to fry the outside of my ship," Gormos said, shaking his head.

"What, you think diving head-first into a black hole is a better option?" I snorted. "If anything, the black hole's going to do worse damage to your ship, not to mention the innocents being squeezed into oblivion inside."

"Maybe we should just let that one sit for a while," Gormos suggested with a shrug. "We already got ideas for the other three. Maybe we'll just stumble upon four on the way."

"Why am I contributing exactly nothing to this conversation?" Hoshiya called from her hospital bed, a space that had been excluded from Gormos and my brainstorming circle. I stopped pacing for a moment to look over my shoulder and reply.

"Because you've been in possession of this poem for fifty some years and have gotten absolutely jack squat out of it—you obviously have no ideas to contribute. Unless, of course, you do. In that case, would you care to share them with us?" I gestured to an invisible stage at the foot of her bed, miming the expectance of a performance. She raised her lip in a snarl, but failed to contribute anything further to our exchange.


	8. In which bad communication kills

With definite destinations decided (the Aisha home world first on our agenda), we began executing the escape plan. It went off without a hitch initially. Gormos trotted off down the hallway to collect provisions and open a door to the spaceship hangar, and I helped Hoshiya transfer to a wheelchair, careful to not put too much strain on her still-adjusting heart. We wheeled down the wide, white hallways silently. It was an eerie feeling. The wing had the spitting image of a hospital, save for not having a central locus for nurses and doctors to congregate. The wooden hand bar that lined the walls and the sterilized white tile and paint job seemed to effect the smell and presence of the corridor. Hoshiya's wings drooped down, body language roughly equivalent to an animal folding its ears in fear.

On our way to the hangar, our only obstacles were the guards at the entrance and exit of each corridor we had to pass through. Hoshiya handled them with elegance. When we rolled up to them, she stared them square in the eye and delivered a curt, no-nonsense smile. Her hands, low enough for the guard not to notice their suspicious movements, twirled her pinkies in lazy circles, conjuring up a spell of persuasion. The eyes of each guard would glaze over like the eyes of a passionate fool, and just like that, they would step out of our way with an oafish smile.

"That's pretty good magic, Faerie," I whispered to her as we approached our final guard, "but how can I be assured that you're not using that same spell on me?"

"Simple, Dr. Frank," she replied, not bothering to lower her voice. "My spell only works on the stupidest of species."

"Oh," I said with a nod, willing to believe her—after all, she was the expert on magic, not me. It was only after I looked down at her hands to see her pinkies spinning that I grew suspicious of my own acceptance of her explanation. I glared at her distrustfully. "Faeries—the maidens of deceit."

"Feathers—miserable ground munchers," she sang back, apparently very pleased with herself.

The hallways, in our zig-zag to make it safely to the hangar, had slowly transitioned from the blinding white of a hospital setting to a stainless steel, no longer smooth but many-faceted with multiple control panels that seemed attached to nothing. The floor, too, turned from tile to a metal grate, the working of the space station clearly visible beneath it. The dimensions of the hallways also shifted, from a size suitable for humanoid walking to enormous proportions: tall ceilings and wide girth. The hangar entrance we were heading towards was, according to Gormos, primarily used for bringing in equipment and technology for the penitentiary. That explained the large corrugated garage doors lining the hallway, as well as its obnoxious size.

It was a bit creepier to travel those huge hallways all alone, and with the intention of going undetected. It seemed so much more likely for a figure to pop out of one of the many doorways or hatches distributed throughout the walls and ceiling. The only thing preventing me from spiraling into a full-on anxiety attack was Gormos' reassurance that today's shipment had come in hours ago. Also, Gormos reported that those who worked in shipping was notoriously lazy; if there wasn't a shipment directly on their doorstep, they were unlikely to be in the workplace.

As we neared the end of the hallway, I saw a single doorway open, and prayed that this was our exit. We hadn't the foresight to equip the two teams of our plan with walkie-talkies, which left Hoshiya and I guessing at whether or not Gormos had sufficient time to open the door, and whether or not the coast was clear for us to scramble towards Gormos' craft. I hadn't the guts to tell Gormos that I wasn't exactly sure what his ship looked like, either. I knew he would've taken the question as an insult: I had seen his ship a million times, I knew, but my mind had terrible trouble distinguishing one space craft from another. (They were all anonymous, winged lumps of metal to me.) Yet Gormos took such perverse pride in that ship that my inability to identify would strike him as a personal affront, and I hadn't wanted to deal with the repercussions of a slighted Gormos—repercussions that would've ranged anywhere from that annoying sad-puppy face, to a swipe of the claws across the face, to a complete lack of cooperation with our plan. My fingers were crossed that my decision wouldn't completely backfire.

Murphy's law seemed to be the mandate as we approached that open doorway. As soon as we got close enough to distinguish figures on the other side of the door, it became clear that there was quite a bit of movement out in the hangar, contrary to Gormos' reassurance. My stomach dropped to my knees as a loud, mechanical clanking rang dully through the corridor—and with a nauseatingly gradual movement, the large main door at the very end of the corridor began to rise, revealing the boots of idling workmen and a large, many-wheeled cart.

I broke into a sprint for the smaller door, slowed slightly by having to push the bulk of Hoshiya. Hoshiya fumbled with the handcuffs, casting all sorts of minor curses to unbind herself. In apparent panic, though, it seemed her magic betrayed her, keeping her fastened to the wheelchair and giving us both a handicap in making our escape.

Clutching the arm rests with whitened knuckles, she shouted for me to hurry up—a little too loudly. The door was already halfway open, which left Hoshiya and I in plain view. We had only been left unnoticed because of the deafening rattle of the door's mechanism, and the fact the workmen were less interested in the path ahead than swapping obscene personal anecdotes (or at least from what I could surmise from certain whole-body gestures some of the workmen mimed). Hoshiya's shrill voice managed to penetrate the low roar of the door, catching the workmen's attention. Assorted exclamations dropped from their lips, and a few higher-ranked workmen reached for the laser guns holstered on their belts.

"Well, this could've gone better," I grumbled, gritting my teeth. "Hoshiya, if you can only do _one_ spell and not screw it up, be a doll and retrieve me one of those suckers' guns, will you?"

"Can do better than that," she proclaimed haughtily, obviously insulted by me implying she was useless. Directing her still-bound hands towards the line of workmen who were now taking intermittent shots at us (a few others chattering in a foreign language into communicators on their forearms), she cast a potent spell towards them. Blobs of thick, translucent turquoise leapt from her hands to encase and mute the few who had communicators; smaller globules consumed the gun-hands of the armed gunmen, one of the blobs lifting the gun from its workman owner's hand entirely. The suspended gun traveled back to us rapidly, and I caught it right above my head. As the gun made contact with my hand, the turquoise bubble burst, splattering Hoshiya and I with a rain of turquoise goo.

"Smooth, Faerie," I mumbled, wiping the goo free of my eyes with the back of my hand, the other still pushing the wheelchair as fast as I could. "Let's hope your spell didn't completely incapacitate this gun." Getting a good grip on the handle, I aimed the laser downwards, apparently about to shoot Hoshiya. She twisted her body around as best she could, gawking at me.

"What in the Faerie Queen's name do you think you're doing?!" she shrieked.

"Just stay still, sweetheart." I scrunched one eye closed and aimed. With four precise shots, the handcuffs that shackled Hoshiya to the wheelchair broke away easily, skittering across the metal floor with a sizzling sound. Hoshiya popped out of the wheelchair quickly, and I tossed the useless chair aside. Completely unintentionally, the wheelchair sideswiped one of the workmen we were passing, knocking him flat on his face.

Apparently the workmen had called security backup, because soon the red emergency doors were issuing in alarming amounts of armed and armored security personnel. Hoshiya was using long-range spells to keep a portion of them at bay. Her arsenal was quite impressive, ranging from shimmering barriers to massive tidal waves conjured out of thin air. I served as her pathetic sidekick, able to offer only the occasional rear cover in the form of poorly aimed laser blasts.

"You're really awful with that gun," Hoshiya said. Her voice wasn't mocking, but genuinely surprised at how terrible my long range shot was.

"You worry about keeping them off, I'll worry about finding Gormos' ship," I grumbled, trying to keep a portion of my pride in tact.

Hoshiya and I stood back-to-back, her front facing a legion of firing guards, my front facing a string of unidentified ships. Some owners who had been tinkering with their ships upon our arrival took the liberty of assisting the penitentiary's troops, aiming their cannons at us. This helped me to eliminate at least a few of the ships that couldn't possibly belong to Gormos. Hoshiya made quick work of those ships that dared point their barrels at us. Straining one arm backwards, she sent a bolt of lightning through each attacking ship, rendering them nonfunctional and, for many, blackened and fried.

For a full ten minutes we battled in this position, moving slowly sideways to allow me, frantic and clueless, to scan the aisles of ships and find Gormos'. Finally, Hoshiya screamed back at me.

"It's not a needle in a haystack, Frank! Find the bloody ship!"

"I-I … I don't know which one it is," I stuttered, my face flushing in embarrassment.

"Oh for the love of …" she groaned. I could practically hear her rolling her eyes. "Never trust a Feather to do a Faerie's job, I guess," she grumbled. With one handing maintaining the spell that held off the fire and forward movement of the reinforcements, Hoshiya used the other hand to create what looked like the ghost of a loudspeaker. She spoke into it, and her voice projected throughout the hangar with unexpected volume. "Gormos, Frank is a bloody idiot, so give us a little hint where you're hiding out, ok?"

Immediately, a green laser lanced through the hangar over our heads, blasting a troop of soldiers that were just attempting to enter the hangar. My head snapped in the direction of the laser blast—my mind traced it back to a smaller-sized ship near the exit of the hangar (which happened to still be distressingly closed). I grabbed Hoshiya with one arm around the waist around my back and began dragging her in the proper direction. She at first struggled at my sudden grip on her, but upon seeing that I was actually making progress in my search for the ship, she wrapped her legs around my midsection in a backwards piggy-back, continuing to hold off the troops with both hands.

I galloped towards the ship as fast as I could as a bipedal mammal carrying someone roughly my size. The ship I traced the laser back to dropped its entry bridge as I approached. Without thinking twice, I scrambled up the hatchway, the bridge lifting up to close as I walked on it. The entrance closed with a slight sucking sound, and Hoshiya hopped off my back.

The interior of Gormos' ship was far more familiar than its outside. The ship was shaped like a three-dimensional parallelogram with extreme obtuse and acute angles, wings near the rear and boost engines affixed beneath them. I mentally chastised myself for not recognizing the extremely cheesy, species-pride black Kougra stripes painted on the side of the craft, three on each side, like vertical claw marks ripped in the side. (It was the intergalactic equivalent of displaying redneck pride.)

The walkway led to a long corridor that ended in the cockpit of the ship, where I could see Gormos' profile facing the control panel in his captain swivel chair. Several doors lined the hallway, along with several vents, trapdoors and control panels that controlled various life-support or mechanical functions of the ship. The doors led to personal rooms, most of which were used for storage—storage of certain stolen medical supplies and equipment that couldn't be safely stored in public storage. Hoshiya and I stormed down that single path to the cockpit, where Gormos was flicking switches and levers seemingly at random.

"So are we good to go, cap'n?" I asked Gormos, slightly out of breath and speaking in my best sailor accent.

"Well, we would be, if you hadn't forced me to make myself completely obvious by firing a laser all could see … because you couldn't recognize my bloody _ship_!" There it was—the shrill note of personal injury in Gormos voice. I covered my face with my hands in aggravation.

"For the love of betty, Gormos, knowing the exterior of your ship by heart is not high on my priority list right now," I groaned, clenching my jaw tightly.

"Doesn't matter. I can't get clearance for them to open the gate, 'cause they know we're the ship with the fugitives," Gormos said, glaring at me pointedly.

"This wouldn't've happened if you actually knew the hours shipments came in!" I retorted, pulling my hands away from my face so I could engage in the malevolent glaring contest being waged between us.

"Will you two stop it with your love spat? Just tell me where the button or lever or whatever it is that opens the gate is," Hoshiya fumed, throwing her hands up in exasperation.

"It's not just a button. There's a whole series of voice-clearances and commands you have to get through. It's a complicated process," Gormos explained wearily, momentarily deflated by Hoshiya's sudden spurt of rage. I, on the other hand, was still brimming with anger.

"Which, if you had gotten beforehand, wouldn't be a problem!" I nearly exploded at Gormos. Gormos' anger reignited, the Kougra stood up with a stomp his feet from his chair, towering over me a good few feet. Despite the height difference, I refused to back down, glowering up at him with all of the irritation and hatred I could muster. His fur bristled on end to give him the appearance of greater size, and he opened his mouth just slightly to unveil his fangs.

"For the love of the Faerie Queen! You babies are gonna get us killed. Never mind, I'll do it my bloody self," Hoshiya hissed, and stormed over to the very middle of the cockpit control panel. Raising both her hands as if summoning a crowd to continue a roaring cheer, she lowered her chin, focusing her eyes on the massive gate in front of us. Gormos and I looked over at her simultaneously, our curiosity temporarily stemming our hostility. Her fingers curled into fists, and she squeezed her eyes shut, obviously performing some sort of magic. Yet outside the gate didn't budge, and the sound of approaching group footsteps grew closer. Still, she maintained her position, her fists shaking with effort first, a tremble that traveled to her entire body. Blood began to dribble from between her fingers as her nails penetrated the flesh of his palms in excruciating effort.

Gormos and I exchanged a quizzical look. Gormos, relentlessly kind-hearted, padded over to her quietly, and placed a hand on her right shoulder. "S'ok, Hoshiya," he said softly. "Don't hurt yourself now. We'll only get a few years in jail. It's no biggie."

"A few _years_? Oohhh betty," I groaned, falling to my knees. I beat the metal ground in utter frustration, unable to contain the feeling any longer. Indeed, getting caught might mean a few years in the slammer, but such a stain would never leave my record. I'd be fired from the only job as a legitimate intergalactic doctor I ever had, and it would be impossible to obtain an actual intergalactic medical license with a record. This was all assuming that cursed mark took more than a few years to spread. If it didn't, I wouldn't even have to worry about my entire reputation being ruined—I would be, metaphorically, six feet under. "I don't _have_ a few years!" I cried out, and the beginning of a sob strangled the end of my sentence.

Inspired by desperation, I sprang to my feet. I took to Hoshiya's other side, perching my head in a falsely affectionate gesture on her shoulder. While wrapping my right arm around her waist, I made my left arm parallel with hers, grasping her with my infected hand by the wrist. Though she didn't turn her head to face me, I turned mine so my lips were aligned with her ear.

"Now you listen to me, Faerie. You're gonna open that gate, you hear? You're gonna open that gate if it takes every last ounce of strength in your body. And you know what I'm offering you? My strength, too. Take it. I won't need it if I can't cure this bloody disease. So take it. We're going to open this godforsaken door, do you hear me? Do you _hear_ me, Faerie?"

My whisper was laced with spite, insanity, and a subtle sadness—a knowledge of imminent destruction if this last ditch plan didn't work. She kept her eye trained on the door, but her mouth opened a tiny slit, enough to form words at a volume just enough for my ears. "I hear you, Feather."


	9. In which there is blatant foreshadowing

((J. Dac says: Blame the lateness of this chapter on four twenty.))

I wasn't witness to the gate opening, though Gormos would later call it a miracle while jumping up and down like a little girl excited about a new flavor of bubblegum. The world darkened around me as soon as she uttered that phrase, as if her words had contained some underlying spell that knocked me unconscious.

To call my state unconscious, though, would be deceptive. If that was absolutely true, I would've remembered nothing between my desperate plea and pact and when I awakened, Gormos' concerned mug filling the span of my vision. Yet within that span of time there was an unexplained phantasm, a memory with no root and no context. It wasn't even an experience, in a classic sense, for there was no background, no story leading up to the sudden lapse in timeline. It was as if some funnel had opened from the present into different time periods, and like a vacuum, had sucked up and deposited a few fragments of the past into the present, framed by clean black.

I saw, for instance, my family at a summer reunion, everyone dressed in pressed dress shirts and khakis, and the sun catching on green-haired heads and the white teeth of smiles. It was a memory from when I was a toddler, apparent by the fact the perspective saw only from the waist down without tilting upwards.

Then a bolt of anguish coursing through my body: the bright light that annihilates, bearing down on my helpless comrades as they grew smaller and smaller on the escape pod's radar. The memory had grown old with time, and much of its initial shock had been lost, like the outlines of a watercolor blurring with time. I rarely revisited in the present day, disregarding its significance and distancing it from myself entirely. Now, its re-emergence was accompanied with fresh agony, like a scar ripped back to reveal a new wound. Tears—I could feel them warm against my cheeks, though when I touched them, there was nothing for me to feel, and nothing for me with which to feel.

The perspective seemed to shift, swiveling around so instead of facing the catastrophe, I faced the tiny escape pod, my face framed in the tiny circular window. I could see my face split in shock and sorrow, cheeks damp and eyes wide. My hand pawed uselessly at the glass, and my entire face contorted in an ugly sob. My face retreated from the window, unable to bear the sight.

Then, a new scene: me, pathetic on my death bed, enveloped in olive from toe to neck. The mark crept its way up my body in explorative tendrils. I could feel the crunching of my internal organs; I could feel the sweat on the sheets sticking to my mutated skin, I could feel my vocal chords cry out in suffering, and delirium cloud my mind. Amidst my foggy mind, though, there whispered a voice. Behind my drooping eyelids hot with fever lurked an image—a pale-skinned Faerie murmuring a promise for a frantic mind, a way out of living torture and ultimate demise. "I'll take it," I gasped. "I'll take it, I'll take it, I'll _take it_!"

A crowd cheered somewhere far off, and I was in moments at a rally—no, before a rally, for I looked down upon them from a podium lifted above the crowd. There were millions of a single breed of alien, but they were unlike any alien I had ever seen before: short (barely clearing the three foot mark), green, with two wobbly, ridiculous antennae and two glowing, trusting eyes, red like mine. They hoisted banners, some handmade, proclaiming "Htols lliw evas su lla!" in black paint. A cult of personality centered around a figure whose face flew on vertical portrait banners: a cruel countenance, smirking even in its iconic pose, olive green and with chin dissolving into neck, three tufts serving as hair.

Someone approached me from the side—I turned to ask questions, but as in any dream, my motions were out of my control. That someone happened to be Gormos. While his physique and facial construction were the same, his clothes were drastically different: armor suited for intergalactic combat, with a blaster hanging from his belt. I attempted to open my mouth again, this time with a different question: what was Gormos, an adamant and somewhat cowardly pacifist, doing in a soldier's uniform? I found the answer without having to ask the question. Though his face was roughly the same physically, subtle differences colored his features: a cold downturn of his mouth, his eyes narrowed just a sliver for a piercing, permanent glare. I was almost afraid of having his paw on my arm, for the claws were just slightly extended, something Gormos only did when he was royally pissed.

"Wake up," he said stonily.

"Wh-what?" I asked, barely able to control the pitch of my voice, fluctuating with fear.

"Wake up," he repeated.

With his utterance, the world around me broke off into fragments until it seemed a mosaic, a cumulative picture made from miniscule scales. Suddenly, the scales burst out of their original order, revealing another scene entirely under their veil. The massive rally was replaced by a steel ceiling, and a room filled with the pleasant hum and beeps of a functioning ship. Gormos' face was the only thing that remained constant between unconsciousness and waking—except, of course, his clothes became his familiar ratty work vest and his face lost its sharper features.

"Oh thank betty!" Gormos sighed once the world had stabilized. "Frank, you're all right!"

"What happened?" I murmured, my throat inexplicably sore. In fact, my whole body ached without any specific ailment, as if my muscles had decided it would be a good idea to roll over in pain. I tried to sit up, but my abdominals completely disobeyed orders, and I found myself falling back to the hard ground on which I was laid out. Gormos barely caught my head in time to prevent it from becoming split cantaloupe. It was a bit embarrassing to be cradled by a giant, furry creature (and sort of trippy simultaneously), but I was so floored by a sudden wave of exhaustion I abandoned all sense of dignity.

"You latched onto Hoshi like a parasite, and then she opened the gate, and then you passed out," Gormos said. "We got away alright, but I was afraid we lost you for a second there. I thought you were gonna throttle her or something when you grabbed her for a second back there. Thought you went crazy."

I forced my eyes to remain open in spite of the heaviness of my eyelids. Gormos and I were in one of the sleeping cabins in his ship, the beds still folded into the walls. For a bedroom, it was a surprisingly comfortless room, all angles and stainless steel, able to be washed efficiently with a large, high-pressure hose. I let my head drop back into Gormos' furry bicep, using it as a makeshift shag pillow. "Ugh. How long was I out?"

"Few hours or so. Hoshi said you should be fine, but … well, I don't really trust the broad," Gormos admitted with a shrug. "Thought she had put some killing curse on you or something."

I lifted my left hand to observe my palm. The mark remained—had extended, in fact, to kiss the roots of my fingers. With a sigh, I folded my hand under my right arm, as if concealing it would deny it existence. "Yeah, well, she already covered that base earlier," I replied flatly. "Where is the wench?"

"Watching the cockpit."

I stirred uneasily. "If you don't trust her, why're you letting her watch the cockpit? Far as you know, she'll plunge us into a sun just after bailing on us," I pointed out.

"Nah, I don't think so. She said she wanted to see you when you woke up. Said it was important." Carefully, Gormos laid me out on the ground and, still crouching, turned to the fold-out bed. Grabbing a handle firmly, he pulled out the bed with a single arm, a task that would've forced me to use both arms and sacrifice a lot of pathetic huffing-and-puffing. The bed fell out with a crash, just narrowly not pinning Gormos' tail by a few millimeters. Gingerly, he lifted me from the ground and placed me on the mattress, which was only a fraction softer than the ground.

"And why're you calling her Hoshi?" I demanded as Gormos stood up, dusting off his hands against each other. I twisted my body so I could face Gormos rather than the ceiling. "Are you two getting all chummy on me?"

"Chill, Feather. Nobody's chummy here besides you two bosom buddies," Hoshiya's voice sneered from the doorway. Gormos and I both turned our attention towards her. Hoshiya stabbed her thumb in the direction of the cockpit. "Better go cover the cockpit, Gormos," Hoshiya suggested coolly, and stepped out of the doorway momentarily to let Gormos dash past her. Bowing her head sternly, she eased into the room, shutting the door behind her. "For added privacy," she explained evenly.

"Gonna try and smother me, Faerie?" I snarled. Our semi-intimate experience opening the gate had done little to dissolve any spite I had towards her or other Faeries. "'Fraid we're both out of luck—these fold outs don't have pillows."

"Idiot. I'm not trying to kill you," she said, rolling her eyes. "I can't, anyway. Like you said, Faerie law. You saved my life—at the very least I need to refrain from taking yours." She walked over to the wall opposite my fold out bed, and leaned her back against it. Slowly, she slid down until she was sitting on her rump, legs crossed Indian-style. She had changed out of the revealing hospital gown in which I had last seen her, and now donned one of Gormos' spare navy maintenance jumpsuits. The jumpsuit hung off her frame like a parachute, one bare, brown shoulder revealed with the sagging weight of the material. The only thing that kept the jumpsuit from slumping off her body was an extension cord tied around her waist, giving the minimum amount of female shapeliness to her outfit. I noticed, too, her hair was coming in slowly, darkening her hairline.

I can't say I didn't find that single shoulder and cinched waist incredibly enticing. Perhaps this was highlighted by the fact that for the first time her face wasn't construed in an expression of disgust for me. Rather, she seemed almost inquisitive.

"Why did you help me?" she asked with an alarming lack of forcefulness.

I shrugged. "We needed to get out—I needed to get out to save my life. You obviously couldn't handle opening the gate on your own. I was working on a hypothesis. I figured you just needed more energy, and also assumed energy came from life force. So, I decided to lend you some of mine."

"You're one and a half portions right," she said. "I did need more energy. The bloody gate was a whole lot heavier than I had anticipated. I could've done it, eventually, but we didn't have the time. And yes, magical energy is drawn off of life force—but only in a sense. Magic energy rides off emotions, mostly, and life causes emotions. Your anger gave me plenty of fuel to open the gate, but … in the process … I accidentally ran across … other memories of yours."

"Oh." A pause extended between us, not tense, but anxious. "Well, that explains some of the … images I saw while passed out."

"I assume that two of those scenes were memories," Hoshiya said softly, turning her eyes towards the ground. "A-and … I'm sorry for your loss. You do know … you do know most Faeries had no idea what was really going on?"

"It's society's responsibility to examine its administrators," I replied coldly. "When a society supports a monarchy, it's double their responsibility to pay attention, and inspire the masses to rise up in revolution when the time inevitably comes. Ignorance doesn't make you exempt from guilt. And I'm not going to forgive you, or the rest of the Faeries in blissful ignorance. Understood?"

She seemed taken aback by my stony proclamation, and immediately withdrew some of the vulnerability she had laid out initially. "That's a cold assessment," she answered with a slight sniff.

"That's my truth. Take it or leave it."

She stuck out her lower lip, tracing designs in some of the dust on the floor with her forefinger. "Anyway, what interests me is the second two scenes. They didn't seem like memories at all."

"They weren't," I said. "I recognized a few people in them, but I haven't lived them."

"You haven't lived them _yet_," Hoshiya clarified. "I'm fairly certain those scenes were pulled from the future."

"Well, that's reassuring," I said sarcastically, the scene with me struggling in bed impressed all too vividly in my mind. "But why would you draw emotions from scenes from the future? Can you normally predict the future or something? 'Cause I really have no idea how Faerie magic works, and whether or not it includes clairvoyance."

"Only extremely powerful Faeries, like the Queen Faerie, can see the future," Hoshiya said. "However, if a Faerie—even an ordinary Faerie—is sufficiently charged and motivated, it's not uncommon for said Faerie to be able to see the future. In fact, it's one of the symptoms of being over one's magical limit. It probably extended to you as well because you were touching me."

"Then give me some good news, Faerie—having had this sneak peek into the future, is there any way to change it? Basically, I'm asking that age-old question: fate or free will?"

"I'm thinking it's the latter, because the Faerie Queen is said to often use her powers to steer Faerie society away from danger. So, I guess I'm trying to tell you … not to worry. I also wanted to ask you … do you have any idea what that last scene was all about?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "No idea. I mean, I recognized Gormos, but that was about it. I couldn't tell you where I was. I've never seen those creatures before, let alone that land. I barely even felt like I was part of that scene."

The seriousness of the moment was broken by a sudden exclamation from my stomach, reminding me that I was ravenously hungry. Hoshiya stood up suddenly, heading towards the door. "You should rest some more," Hoshiya commented, keeping her tone purposefully flippant. "I drained quite a bit of energy out of you. I'll get Gormos to start cooking something."

"Thoughtful, yet suspicious," I thought aloud, leaning back in the bed. "Is the Faerie beginning to feel a little guilt for afflicting me with this wound?"

She looked back at me, one hand on the door's frame. I held out my left hand so she could see the mark and that it was spreading, conquering territory both above and below it. She pursed her lips, and turned her face away.

"You're not going to die, Feather. I won't let you. So stop bothering me about it, or I might change my mind." She slammed the door definitively behind her, and I stretched my arms out above my head, a contented smile crawling cat-like across my face. Still, despite the continuing friction between us, I felt a bit of my reservations towards Hoshiya wear away. Indeed, she was still a Faerie, and not to be wholly trusted. But considering our conversation, the fact she was in my debt, and the fact Gormos and I outnumbered her gave me some peace of mind around her that would be essential to coexisting with her in the ship.

The Aisha home world was a considerable distance from their space station. In fact, the Aisha's expressed purpose of creating that space station was to be a middle point from their home world to even further space travel. What most space epics fail to portray is the excruciating boredom that insulates the brief pockets of adventure in space. Even traveling at a rate above light speed, there was considerable travel time—longer than any road trip an average Neopian could imagine. We spent three weeks in that miserable ship, and cabin fever struck in the middle of the first week. By then, we had exhausted all card games, and after Gormos managed to lose one of the kings, our card games stopped entirely. Simon Says got old with only two people, even though it was fun to get the Faerie _and_ Gormos to do humiliating things. Arm-wrestling proved amusing for only Gormos—fragile Feather and Faerie arms were no match for Gormos' chiseled biceps. Only Gormos and Hoshiya were interested in weight-lifting. There were some spare free weights in the storage room, alongside my medical equipment. We alternated using the storage room as a gym and a lab.

When we grew sick of one another, we retreated to our separate rooms, which weren't actually separate, because Gormos and I had to share a room. (Hoshiya, in a moment of den-mother domination, demanded she occupy the single, which wasn't any bigger than the 'double.')

Though my first impression pegged Hoshiya as a butch Faerie, spending extended periods of time with her provided me a window into her gratingly girlish side. She busted out the hair accessories and brush, and attacked helpless Gormos, who wound up looking like a botched Beauty Contest entry. Having sufficiently emasculated Gormos, she turned her crosshairs towards me.

"Oh, no, no, no, _no_," I said, holding up my hands defensively. I leaned back as far as I could on the chair I sat in inside the cockpit. "I'm not letting you turn me into _that_," I said, pointing to Gormos in the captain seat, who was struggling in vain to undo the braids Hoshiya had made out of his whiskers.

"Alright, alright, no makeup," she promised, "but at _least_ let me groom your wings."

"Why? They're useless. I might as well chop them off and sell them to the highest bidder," I said, waving towards my back dismissively. "The only reason I haven't yet is because it would probably hurt massively."

She ignored my pragmatic statements. With her eyes fixed on my wings, strapped down under my scrubs, she circled me like a Pteri coming in for the kill. "Take off your shirt," she ordered, dropping her girlish voice for a more commanding one. I gave a look of alarm towards Gormos, who shrugged his shoulders helplessly. I rolled my eyes but removed my top so she could see my wings more clearly, rather than a vague outline under my shirt. "Take off the harness," she continued. Not wanting to make this any more painful than it needed to be, I undid the several belt-like buckles that secured the harness. Leaning forward, I allowed my wings to stretch out. Immediately they twisted in a cramp, not used to actually being moved.

"Son of a--!" I groaned, reeling forward in pain. Hoshiya reached forward and grabbed the afflicted wing, massaging it gently. A shiver ran through me at her touch: in Feather society, it was considered extremely rude or a gesture of exceptional intimacy to touch another's wings with the hands. I jerked away my wing automatically, feeling violated. "Jeez, at least warn me before you're going to touch 'em." She shrugged, and reached forward for them again, stroking the white feathers with a gaze of fascination.

"Faerie common knowledge says that Feather wings are unclean and gritty because of their feathers," she commented, running her fingers slowly over each individual feather. "But they're quite soft. Very clean, too. No smell."

"Well, I maintain my hygiene," I said irritably. "Now kindly unhand me." She continued to ignore my requests, and leaned down to pluck a rough hair brush from her plastic box of beauty weaponry. She began brushing my wings with a brusque motion, nearly knocking me off my chair until I steadied myself by planting my two feet firmly on the ground. I looked over to Gormos miserably. "Make her stop."

"She can't be stopped. She's a beautician possessed," Gormos complained, picking the ribbons out of his hair.

Hoshiya's insistent, daily nagging convinced me to abandon the harness for my wings completely, at least within the confines of the ship. I at first pointed out that I would be unable to wear a shirt regularly without my wings pinned to my back (something I was not willing to do, even in the company of non-strangers). Hoshiya eliminated this valid complaint by cutting two large slits into the back of all of my scrub shirts while I was napping. Upon waking and seeing my newly tailored scrubs, I nearly pitched a fit. Gormos just barely managed to calm me down and prevent me from attacking a sleeping Hoshiya with the scissors in question. With few other options, I began reluctantly wearing the scrubs. As predicted, my wings got clumsily in the way of everyday actions—I was painfully unused to accounting for the space they occupied behind me. Daily movement, though, allowed me to adjust. Soon I navigated the ship with relative ease, bowing my wings when they would strike the ceiling, folding them against my back in narrow passages, and flexing them in the morning to give them regular exercise.


	10. In which Aisha City is New York City

((J. Dac: I'm currently being maimed by finals/crippling addiction to Pokemon Pearl. In the only good news in my life, I at least managed to send out 6 copies of a manuscript of mine to literary magazines … because this was all the postage I could afford. (Simultaneous submission, hollah.) Let the rejection letters roll.))

Finally, after what seemed like eternity, the Aisha home world hovered like an opalescent orb in our space shield. Of course, we couldn't enter their borders legally—the warrant for our arrest and the exact description and license of our ship was undoubtedly already in the hands of Aisha authorities. Thankfully, Gormos had the foresight to alter the code of our cloaking device to make his ship appear a friendly, anonymous tourist vehicle, complete with fabricated entrance codes. Once we stepped off the ship, however, our veil of fake identity would be lifted.

Much to my disdain, we resorted to magic to amend that. Hoshiya magically altered old repairman jumpsuits left in a cranny of Gormos' ship into extravagant, velvet black robes that I had to reluctantly admit were of excellent craftsmanship. Hoshiya and I would wear these to resemble a race of alien called Nyswans, an extremely religious—and humanoid—race that constantly covered their pallid flesh in drooping, ghastly robes.

Gormos, on the other hand, required a more elaborate disguise. Chanting a series of repetitive phrases, Hoshiya conjured a glass flask in midair filled with a thick turquoise-colored liquid. She held it out for Gormos to take with the stoic instructions, "Drink it."

"Hold your horses, honey," Gormos said, backing away from the flask nervously.

"I see you acquired your selection of casual pet names from Frank," Hoshiya said dryly. (Now that we were going into an atmosphere-entering sequence, Hoshiya had returned to her jerk persona.)

"I'm not gonna drink that," Gormos said stubbornly, crossing his arms powerfully across his chest. He rolled his shoulders backwards to extend to his full height, an intimidating one by anyone's measure. Hoshiya didn't back down.

"Look, it looks less objectionable than a lot of the water you drink in that blasted space station," Hoshiya said, clearly losing patience, if she had any in the first place. (She was right—our water, being constantly recycled and filtered to decrease the reliance on importation, was always of a slightly copper tint. "Our daily dose of heavy metals!" Gormos had optimistically described it.) "It won't hurt you. It's just a Transformation potion."

"That's a big mouthful for a little lady," I snorted derisively.

"Can it, Frank," she shot at me hotly, and returned to quelling Gormos' fears. "They're created by standard Faerie spells—very easy, early spells Faeries learn early and master easily. I made this one so you can transform into an Alien Aisha."

"Me?! Why me, _specifically_? Why can't both of you do it, too? Why am I being victimized?" Gormos whined, his ears pressed flat against his skull in more fear than anger.

"Because even though they're easy to make, the potion still takes a lot of energy to make, especially if you're converting such a large species to such a tiny one," Hoshiya explained, clearly glossing over certain details. I could see the deception gears spinning between those two cropped ears. Because I wanted to be able to freely travel the Aisha world, however, I didn't alert Gormos to what was obvious manipulation via omission. "I only had enough energy to make one for you. And think about it this way—you'll be much safer from detection than me or Frank."

Gormos' facial expression visibly shifted throughout her speech, falling from total resistance to faltering resistance, to leery consideration, to begrudging acceptance. He snatched the bottle out of the air gruffly, glaring at Hoshiya markedly. "Fine." He uncorked the bottle quickly and waved it under his nose like a wine connoisseur. He grimaced, and then looked at me over the lip of the bottle warily. "Frank, avenge my death, ok?"

"Don't have to ask me twice," I replied, giving a dirty glance at Hoshiya. Her eyes remained locked on Gormos about to drink the potion, a determination in her eyes. I wondered—and worried at—what she had been purposefully holding back.

Gormos took a deep breath in; considered Hoshiya, considered me; and then threw it back like a shot, downing the contents in a matter of seconds. He didn't bother to cover the lingering drops at the bottom, like he did with all other beverages. His face twisted into a sour expression, and he wiped his whiskers (dewed with droplets from the potion) with the back of his paw. "Sick," he coughed, his voice ragged. "So when should I start feeling changes?"

I couldn't answer him immediately due to being shocked speechless by four ear stalks sprouting very suddenly out of the crest of Gormos' head. They swayed of their own according, sensitively adjusting to discreet, individual sounds in the room. From their roots the change spread, shriveling Gormos' thick coat of fur into the short coat of a green Aisha. His facial features restructured, softening into a pint-sized muzzle, more domesticated housecat than Gormos' feral feline profile. Meanwhile, his body shrank considerably, his tail slurping into his rear end and his muscles visibly deflating. The contours of his eyes squeezed together until they achieved the infamous Aisha squint while the rest of his body finished transforming.

In mere instants, Gormos had been reduced from a creature I couldn't combat in a fist-fight to save my life to one I could kick over with relative ease. His clothes pooled around him like a tent with its interior skeleton knocked out, quietly drifting to the ground.

When the initial shock of it wore off, I bit my lip to repress a laugh.

"Screw you, Frank," Gormos said lowly, his voice clearly his own but tuned an octave higher. The voice change was wholly unexpected, and caused me to be unable to restrain my laughter. It exploded from me with a force that bent me at the waist, covering my eyes to cover the tears threatening to spill over onto my cheeks.

"See? No adverse reactions, right?" The slight twang of anxiety in Hoshiya's voice alerted me to something sketchy, but I decided to ignore it for the time being in favor of humiliating Gormos.

"No, if you don't count how stupid I feel right now," Gormos murmured, struggling to free himself from the loose knot of his clothes. He jumped out from them, naked—acceptable for Aishas. After shaking himself off, he scampered past us to the bedrooms, Hoshiya's containing a mirror. A long groan issued from the open door down the hallway, followed by the sound of things crashing to the ground. Even Hoshiya couldn't suppress a smile: her teeth grasped tightly to her lower lip to prevent it from spreading into a full-on grin.

Gormos emerged eventually, panting heavily (which was quite amusing in itself, because it came off as a toddler coming down from a fit). Trying to act as nonchalant as possible, he walked over to his swivel chair. After a few minutes of unsuccessful hops in an attempt to mount the chair, Gormos turned around and looked at me darkly. "Frank, you want me to land the ship or not?"

Biting the inside of my cheek to ward off a spasm of chuckles, I lifted Gormos under the arms, not unlike a teddy bear, and placed him securely in the swivel chair. Coolly, Gormos reached for his headset and readjusted the headset to comfortably fit his tiny skull. Hoshiya made some poorly advised attempts to assuage Gormos' pride, but that element of Gormos' psyche had already been thoroughly trashed. I, however, knew the cold-shoulder treatment would last twenty minutes at best. It was in Gormos' nature to be a loudmouth, and he suffered more from the silent treatment than the person he was trying to punish.

Hoshiya and I pulled up our hoods to conceal our fugitive faces as we pulled into port. Our landing was relatively hassle-free, save for the fact that Gormos wasn't exactly fluent in Aisha tongue (highly suspicious, considering all Aishas were, by rule, born on their home planet), which forced us to create an impromptu story about pirates cutting out his tongue. Security and customs treated us with the respect due towards devout Nyswans, which worked to our advantage: thanks to their complex and rigid dogma concerning touch—and thanks to intergalactic commitment to political correctness—Nyswans could bypass a full-body frisk before entering a foreign country. Gormos was the only one unfortunate enough to get a pat-down, wearing the sourest face as Aishas he could've punted as a Kougra manhandled him impersonally.

I'd never been to a world outside of Neopia, and entering into Aisha City was overwhelming. Aisha City had acquired the nickname "the center of the universe," and the bustling metropolis lived up to its name. I thought the interior of the space station had been mind-boggling large; yet just in Aisha City alone, I witnesses structures double that size—even more bizarre under an atmosphere, for gravity weighed on these behemoths. Although Aisha City was terrestrial, the technological feats of the Aisha species allowed Aisha City to transform into a literal stainless-steel jungle, distinct levels distinguishable if one rode through it in a hovertaxi.

My first view of this teaming ziggurat came from the hallway-length windows leading us from the landing dock towards the visitor's center. Buildings like beanpoles climbed the sky with ease—their height almost gave the impression that they originated not from the ground, but from heaven itself: a ray of light made from metal. These buildings varied in size, but many had middle levels that bulged out into round disks punctured in the center by the main shaft of the building, allowing for a greater congregation of people and offices on a single floor. Some buildings crested in large domes, seeming to balance precariously on their too-small stem. At times, it gave the impression of being amidst a field of flowers at eye level: flowers that had forsaken their chlorophyll and love for sunlight for steel shields and sleeplessness. Taxis, and other flying vehicles (but primarily taxis, manned by insane intergalactic immigrants with indecipherable accents and potent body odor) hovered and darted about these structures like gnats around an animal's eyes, dipping in and out of landing docks.

At the visitor's center (more or less a tourist shop with tiny spoons emblazoned with "Aisha City" and tacky postcards with the city skyline and white shirts proclaiming "I HEART AC"), we scoured the racks of pamphlets advertising tourist traps to find directions to the Sacred Cavern. Hoshiya soon grew distracted, though, by plastic snowglobes depicting the skyline in hokey polystyrene, and the plushies outfitted in miniature I HEART AC t-shirts.

"Jeez-lou-weez, you think they'd make a holy site easier to find!" Gormos exclaimed irritably as we neared the end of the pamphlet rack with no new leads. I barely heard him; I was still fixated with the grandiose vision of progress and technological mastery displayed in the window I gazed at from the visitor shop. Here was the dream Feathers had carried in their fragile hearts for years manifest: to freely navigate the skies carried in the palm of a superior society constructed by science, and the power of the mind. I felt my throat catch with a wave of emotion; I fought back the lump swelling in my throat before it could metastasize to my tear glands and drain down my cheeks.

It took me a few minutes to register that the tiny fist pounding at my shins was Gormos and not some annoying child who had designated me their temporary parent. I looked down, my romantic reminiscing aborted. "You got any coinage on you, Frank?"

"Uhhh, besides some intergalactic marks left behind in these pants? Probably not," I mumbled. Nyswans spoke in low tones, careful never to raise their voices—I had to be mindful to follow this habit.

"Alright, that's all well and good, but how're we gonna get to the Sacred Cave?" Gormos demanded. "I brought maybe a handful. We gotta pay admission, and the travel fee …"

"You two worry too much," Hoshiya proclaimed, strolling up casually from behind Gormos. The sly look on her face told me she had done something illegal: the involuntary smirk of the self-satisfied criminal, always a useful expression to recognize if you were a penitentiary doctor and you wanted to hold on to the supplies in your exam rooms. "Haven't you guys ever heard the expression 'duck and run'?"

"So you're telling me we're going to get in the taxi, and then not pay the guy?" Gormos expressed the most shock at this deviant plan, his face aghast at the suggestion of such blatant illegal activity. I, having dabbled quite prolifically in the black market, was less phased by the suggestion. Of course I had considered it, but my few remaining strands of morals prevented me from doing anything beyond playing with the thought, unwilling to cheat a hardworking—if albeit annoying—taxi driver of their pay.

"That's exactly what I'm considering," Hoshiya said with a grin.

"Not very holy of you, Mrs. Nyswan," I commented dryly.

"Oh, like you're the picture of the Virgin Mother," Hoshiya shot back. "I've been to Aisha City before on an assignment. This isn't new to me. Just hop in, and as soon as the sucker docks, hop out. And if necessary, hold him off with some good paralysis. And always erase the memory. That's the key to not getting caught."

"An assignment, huh?" I smirked, adjusting the hood off my robes. "How many Aishas did you off in that one, Faerie?" In my blatant antagonism, I had switched over to the Faerie-Feather diplomacy language, very ironically named Peacetongue.

"None of your bloody business, Feather," she spat back, using the same tongue.

"Hey, hey, now let's not get testy you two," Gormos insisted, placing himself physically between us. While he couldn't directly understand our exchange, he could surmise through the sudden change in language that we were somehow jabbing ferociously each others' buttons. Unfortunately, given his diminuative height, him interceding on our argument did little to stop our exchange. Instead, he merely got tangled in our feet as we advanced threateningly towards one another, neither willing to back down.

We were about to engage in a child-like scuffle of vicious slapping and pinching (neither willing to go to the lengths of an actual fist-fight) with Gormos mercilessly in the middle when a drawn out "Hellooooo" spoken in heavily-accented Intergalactic Common interrupted our impending battle. All three of our heads swiveled around; our eyes fell upon a light blue Aisha, its gender inconclusive, all four of its ear stalks waving wildly in greeting.


	11. In which the Protector is a skeezeball

Immediately, Hoshiya and I dropped our positions of engagement, quickly slapping our hands back together at our waists in what qualified as reverence, bowing our heads deeply. Gormos, with difficulty, removed himself from between our legs. I nudged him forward subtly with my toe, silently bestowing upon him the position of ambassador with the task to find out what exactly this Aisha wanted.

"I hear you people talking about Sacred Cave," the Aisha said with a smile, relieving Gormos of his mission to uncover the Aisha's purpose. Being unfamiliar with Aisha body language (I had treated a few in the past, but Aishas mostly stuck to medicinal services administered by their species, as their government had socialized healthcare), I couldn't determine whether or not the smile the Aisha wore was sincere or sinister. For the time being, I had to take it at face value. "You Nyswans, right? Not used to Aisha City, right?"

"Correct," Hoshiya answered, her voice solemn and steady.

"Well, you no have to wait around. I take you. I am taxi driver, I take you around Aisha City." The Aisha walked forward and took Gormos' paw, beginning to pull him in a direction opposite of the way we came. Gormos shot a helpless look back to us as he was pulled away half against his own will by the Aisha. Hoshiya and I exchanged looks, and then shared a shrug.

"We need to get there anyway, right?" Hoshiya muttered. I agreed with a tilt of my head. Silently, we followed after, trying our best to give the appearance of floating just a few inches above the ground as genuine Nyswans did.

The taxi itself was nothing special: standard canary-yellow hover craft, shaped a bit like a sedan with the nubs of hover engines in place of wheels. Its side doors displayed rates by minutes and miles, the leather interior smelled faintly of spices and the plastic barrier dividing the front seats from the back was starred with points of impact. Though we tried to squeeze all three into the back seat, the Aisha cabbie insisted Gormos sit up in shotgun. The Aisha had taken an unusual and somewhat unsettling fondness to Gormos, keeping its hand constantly on Gormos'. The Aisha even situated Gormos' hand forcibly upon the gear shift so it could stay in constant contact with him. As we took off from where the Aisha had parked its craft, the Aisha began addressing Gormos in rapid-fire Aishatalk, causing Gormos to sink down several inches in his seat.

From the back seat, Hoshiya and I stifled snickers.

The taxi shot out of the landing terminal with reckless speed; the light of impending twilight hit my eyes with a marked harshness, and I pulled the hood further down my forehead to act as a visor. Once my eyes had adjusted, though, I couldn't keep them from wandering out the window. If Aisha City had been overwhelming from a mere stationary window, it became utterly comprehensible from its skyroads. I pressed my face unabashedly against the window to get a better look at the endless activity below. A metal and neon canyon yawned beneath us, roads at different levels appearing to criss-cross without a single crash, so perfectly in harmony with one another. On balconies, I could see singular figures move about, appearing more like representations of life than actual living beings.

Hoshiya, less easily mystified by being up high (after all, she'd lived most of her younger years at astonishing altitudes), intervened on the Aisha and Gormos' conversation, which had become more like a one-way barrage of words with Gormos nodding and swallowing. "So what's your name?" Hoshiya asked. Her direct question makes me inwardly cringe, and turn my attention away from the window—a legitimate Nyswan was all about proposing questions with elaborate, flowery language. Hoshiya's layman's diction wouldn't do.

Nevertheless, the Aisha answered without surprise. "I called Jerdana. You call me Jerry for short, right?" Despite the obvious masculine connotation of the nickname Jerry, I was getting the sense that our little blue friend was in fact female—especially from the way she repeatedly sized up Gormos.

"And how long is it going to take us to get to the Sacred Cave?" Hoshiya asked, sitting forward in her seat impatiently. I grabbed her by the back of the robe and quickly pulled her backwards so she maintained a sufficient distance. Nyswans also disdained close proximity to another being, something Hoshiya couldn't seem to avoid.

"Not long, not long at all," Jerry crooned, and temporarily released Gormos' hand from its stranglehold to fiddle with the knob of the radio. Jerry browsed through a sea of static, landing sporatically upon islands of decipherable sound, only to turn the dial back to a blanket of white noise. Finally, she settled on a station that was more scratchy feedback than actual sound, and began humming along to a completely imaginary tune.

Miserably, I sunk down in my seat, pulling the hood of my cloak as far as I could over my ears. Not even the gorgeous vision outside my window could compensate for the torture through which Jerry the somewhat psychotic taxi driver was putting my ears.

Twenty minutes of this nonsense elapsed, and I was fully convinced we were going nowhere. I could no longer maintain the signature patience and placidity of Nyswan (or even the magical meditation that Hoshiya seemed to be performing to help her through the ride). "So, you do plan on eventually stopping _somewhere_, right? Maybe like a diner or something? Because we had a pretty long ride in that space ship, and I'm ridiculously hungry."

"We getting there very soon, very soon," Jerry assured evenly, and turned towards Gormos with a nod. "Open glove compartment, there is map in there for friend to inspect." For the first time, she spoke to him in Intergalactic Common rather than Aishaspeak. If I hadn't been so fatigued and exasperated by the prolonged and nerve-grating ride, this would've set off multiple alarms in my head. As it stood, though, I was just thankful that I could finally lay my eyes on some solid directions. I pulled my hands down my face briefly in relief, and opened my eyes to what should've been a heavily-folded map of Aisha City.

Instead I found the barrel of a laser gun, aimed precisely between my eyes.

Hoshiya gave a loud shout, and reactively lashed out at the laser gun, attempting to neutralize Jerry's hand which held the weapon. Jerry, having obviously handled a gun in such a fashion before, easily eluded Hoshiya's defensive maneuver. With that, Jerry cracked Hoshiya hard across the forehead with the barrel, sending the Faerie falling back against her door and rendering her momentarily dazed. All of this happened so swiftly that I didn't even have an opportunity to grab the gun myself before it was directed back at my face.

With an expert's hand, Jerry used the gun's muzzle to flip back the hood of my cloak, uncovering my face. Jerry glanced back at me with what I presumed to be a smug smile. Her other hand steered the car with an instinct only developed after years of practice and familiarity with the road; it was apparent this wasn't the first time Jerry had pulled this stunt.

"You two fugitives, right?" Jerry asked, although by the easy smile pasted on her face and the gun pointed at my head it was clear she already had her answer. "Taxi driving, it no make much money. Got to make money other way. There is very nice bounty on two of you. But one is missing, right?"

"Nuh—" I began, the threat to my life compelling me towards truth. Hoshiya had other plans, and cut me off with a jab of her heel to my ribs. She took over where I left off.

"Yeah," she agreed, and removed her hood calmly. She made no sudden movements, and wasn't clandestinely spinning her wrist with a defensive charm. "The big cat guy—he got away. Ditched us passing the Andromeda galaxy with his ship. We were out of luck for a while, until we came across this mute here." She gave a deviant grin, one meant to deliberately incense Jerry. "He's our hostage."

Jerry gave a little noise of disapproval, her placid smile pursing into one of irritation. She took a moment to speak to Gormos in the machine-gun rattle jibberish of Aishaspeak, clearly reassuring him. Gormos nodded rapidly, giving Hoshiya a quizzical and bewildered look. I shared the expression, completely unsure of where Hoshiya expected to take this fabrication. With Jerry's head turned away from Hoshiya and me, I felt safe enough to mouth a silent "what the betty?" towards Hoshiya. Hoshiya smirked, and indicated towards her hands with a little dip of her head. I let my eyes steal a glance of her midsection. Her hands had disappeared from in front of her and were slowly working at something behind her back, delicately enough to go undetected.

The blue bounty hunter reverted back to Intergalactic Common Tongue and used the rear view mirror to address us. "Well, he no more your hostage. I free him now. You two my hostages, right?"

"Wrong," Hoshiya replied, and with her single utterance managed to unlatch the door lock and thrust the door open with her back. The rush of air depressurized the cabin, and a roaring wind filled my ears, seeming to overwhelm my eyes as well. I could feel a cold hand wrap around my wrist, and the bright burst of a laser sear past my ear, and if I inhaled I could smell the acrid scent of burning leather. It vanished in an instant as the taxi banked sharply right of its own accord, tossing Hoshiya and I out of the back seat and through the opened door.

Admiring heights from the safety of secure footing is one thing—freefalling without a parachute backup is completely another. Hoshiya and I tumbled chaotically through the open air, the sheer speed of our fall ripping the robes from our bodies to reveal our normal clothes beneath. Air assaulting my face stretched my cheeks back against my teeth, and the current of air instantly evaporated any speck of saliva in my mouth, reducing my girlish scream to a throaty whisper. Hundreds of flights cruised past us in what seemed like seconds, and I could only stare at the ground growing larger below us, expanding like the mouth of a carnivorous beast.

Hoshiya was screaming something, but the wind filled up my ears like cotton. She pointed to her back frantically, and flexed her tiny, insufficient wings demonstratively. My mind was so saturated with fear it couldn't absorb a speck of additional information or execute a single interpretation. Finally, Hoshiya—falling at the same rate as me despite her seemingly useful wings—practically crawled over me through the air, using various aspects of my clothing and anatomy as awkward handholds. Her hand balled into a frustrated fist, she pummeled me between the shoulder blades.

It was like striking a patient just below the kneecap to elicit a kick. My body remembered it was equipped with what were formerly useless sacks of feathers, unable to lift my body and its dense bone marrow from the ground. Yet while my wings failed at that elementary component of flying, they might just be perfectly suitable for gliding and breaking a steep fall. My wings sprang open, and my muscles strained to harness the air to keep slow my fall. The pain was almost intolerable, but faced with a sprained wing versus an ignoble death and a pancake corpse, I picked the former. Hoshiya, having succeeded in preventing my splatter, used her own wings to keep her aloft at my level, tugging upwards on me periodically if she thought I was descending too fast.

My wings slowed my fall sufficiently enough to make what could've been my undoing into an almost pleasant glide down to solid land. Granted, Hoshiya had to help me weave through the different levels of traffic we traveled through (unabashedly freezing vehicles in place and flipping off their drivers), but there was something immensely gratifying about putting my own wings to use—not to mention having the sensation of flying solo. By the time we landed (rather inelegantly—Hoshiya tried to help me with steadying my landing path, but my feet gave out from under me and caused me to tumble on top of her), my wings ached something awful, but the buzz radiating through my body from my first flight cancelled out any actual pain.

Hoshiya slipped out from under me and rolled with gymnastic agility to her feet. I took my time in getting to my feet, wanting to languish a few extra moments in the afterglow of my first flight. I laid back on my outstretched wings, feeling heat blaze off of them from overexertion. The warmth cushioned my back and loosened my muscles, and for a blissful moment I wondered if I had, indeed, died, and was now experiencing some peaceful afterlife.

Hoshiya's face popping into my line of vision reminded me that I was still very much alive. "Everything alright down there?" she asked, her voice only half-concerned.

"I'm fine," I replied with woozy content. My meditative state was interrupted by a sudden cold shot of realization—we had left Gormos behind in a taxi with an armed crazy. I sat up instantly, the heat dispersing away from my skin and leaving me sweating ice. "Holy crap, we totally bailed on Gormos!"

"Don't worry about him," Hoshiya said dismissively, grasping my hand and pulling me to my feet roughly. "He's a big boy, he can take care of himself." I shook my hand out of her grasp, glaring at her accusingly.

"Yeah, he _used_ to be a big boy, until you shrank him to a third his size!" I retorted angrily. "Now you make me abandon my best friend in the middle of nowhere?!" (Even I was slightly surprised at this admission that I considered Gormos close enough to be a 'best friend,' but my anger stopped me from interrupting myself). "Sure, that Jerry character was a nutjob, but for the love of betty, woman, couldn't've you have done something with that magic of yours? Hypnotize the little sucker into driving us to the right place? Oh right, on top of all that, _we have no bloody clue where we are_!" All sense of well-being had hastily departed my body—now the heat that filled me was not pleasant, but the kind that makes its roots in the throat and spreads branches to the cheeks, all the while flushing skin and sending excessive spit arching from an angry mouth.

Unexpectedly, Hoshiya's knuckles connected with my nose, jerking my head backwards, shattering my equilibrium and sending me back on my behind. She flexed her fingers with a grimace, her face stony. Hot blood—blood boiled by my outrage—ran from my nose to my lips from a ruptured vessel, filling my mouth with metal. "Shut up, Frank," she said softly, the low voice that indicated an unseen storm. "I've got this under control."

Brazenly, I wiped the blood from under my nose, shaking off the excess droplets from my hand. The urge to hit her back was overwhelming, and by the way her eyes kept flashing, she was clearly ready for a fight. Still, I knew my limits—while talented with a scalpel, a hand-to-hand melee was not my field, especially against a rule-breaking former (and perhaps even current) assassin with magic on her side.


	12. In which everyone is talking

((J. Dac says: Well, I've got like, three parts left before I run out of "reserved story supply." The trouble I have with this fic is twofold: 1) I really want to write the ending because in my mind those scenes are much more vivid/interesting, but really don't want to write all the in-the-middle plot that's really just an excuse for character development; and 2) I feel like I'm accomplishing nothing when writing fan fiction. We'll see how much time I have this summer.))

Faced with few other options, I decided to follow Hoshiya's lead. We had landed on the absolute bottom level of Aisha City, where pedestrians swarmed the streets like a chaotic colony of ants, all directed by their own volition. Hoshiya conjured us up fresh robes to continue our stint as pseudo-Nyswans. We emerged from the alleyway where we landed and plunged into the fray. Our disguises seemed almost unnecessary—the high density of creatures granted almost anyone instantaneous anonymity. Due to our status as Nyswans, though, passerbys tended to give us more distance, Nyswans being a reverent and respected species.

It took a series of strange encounters with questionable bodega owners as well as dodging several toothless, reeking homeless crazies before we had even a shard of an idea of where we were headed. As it happened, a two-storied tour bus was nosing its way through traffic as we tried to cross a particular street. After scanning the side of the bus for Intergalactic text that explained what sites the bus stopped at, we hedged our hopes on that little bus, dodging fare by pretending we didn't understand any universal language.

With as much feigned inner peace as we could, we took seats at the back of the bus in opposite aisles, still pissed at one another. I pressed my right shoulder up against the window and pulled my feet up to the edge of the seat so I could rest my chin on my knees. I gazed out the window, watching a thousand different species mill about one another in a common churning, and I tried, desperately, to catch a glimpse of a familiar, uncomfortable Aisha face—or maybe even a Kougra again, already, sticking out like a sore thumb. Nothing.

It took the bus a few hours to finally swing towards the Sacred Cave. The route there took us outside of the city, the road congestion gradually easing up as the buildings declined in height. Actual grass began to sprout alongside the road, and modest dwellings nestled themselves amidst the greenery. Soon, even the humble abodes began dwindling until there was only stark countryside, which transitioned by measure into thick underbrush and dense coniferous forests. The road became less and less reliable, the ride becoming jolty and stomach-curdling, and the twisting paths we took disoriented me entirely. I couldn't even attempt to point north.

But suddenly the trees gave way to a clearing that led to a small accumulation of water, and behind that an unexpected, jagged canyon nearly half the height of the city structures. A natural staircase was carved into the side of the canyon from the front of the pond, leading to a disturbingly perfect circular entrance. The area was filled with tourists of all different species, all of them seemingly cinched at the waist with a fanny pack and shading their eyes with a visor cap. The flickering of disposable camera flashes occasionally lit up the interior of the dark entrance, but other than that, what was inside the cave was indistinguishable from its exterior.

The bus unloaded, and Hoshiya and I glided out, trying hard to maintain a sense of Nyswan poise. I kept my eyes trained for any familiar Aisha faces, but thanks to my minimal interaction with that species, all of their pinched eyes and petite mouths too new and similar to be differentiated.

Hoshiya and I joined the queue leading up the staircase, bypassing the tacky gift stand with maps and historical brochures. We kept together out of necessity, neither wanting to be alone in that strange place, but simultaneously despising one another. The sharp silence between us began to agitate me gradually, though—I'd become too accustomed to Gormos' spontaneous outbursts of completely irrelevant conversation to stand not speaking.

"So what're we looking for in this cave, again?" I whispered.

"A mirror, and potentially a crying lady," Hoshiya murmured back, her look of disinterest staying consistent.

"Alright, well, I'll keep an eye out for my own reflection, then," I mumbled. That effectively ended that thread of conversation. Craving more, I decided to antagonize her, if only to get her talking. "Maybe you could keep an eye out for a certain Green Aisha, huh?"

"Look, Frank, we'll find him, okay? But Gormos is _not_ going to freaking die if you don't see him at every second and hey, get this, neither will you, now grow a pair!" Hoshiya hissed back.

"I don't have to grow anything, I can just freaking steal them from you and sew them on myself!" I sneered back.

"At least I'm not a pansy boy with big pansy feathery wings that I can't even use properly," Hoshiya growled, narrowing her eyes.

"If I'm not mistaken, you couldn't get _enough_ of those feathers while we were in transit," I shot back.

"Yeah, well, I'm gonna chalk that one up to not having enough oxygen in that little craphole."

"Thought-cha said you didn't need oxygen, Mrs. Oh-So-Special-Faerie."

"Oh, _technicalities_, Frank," she said with a roll of her eyes. "I was bored, and it annoyed you, so I did it. Besides, you should be comfortable with your own body, even if it is gawky and clumsy."

"Well thank you, Hoshiya. I hope you're comfortable with your personality, even if it is vapid and offensive," I retorted.

Our verbal scuffle continued, though we were conscious enough to keep our voices low so it seemed more like a shared, repetitious chant. The line was slowly inching in to the circular opening. Over the heads of those in front of us, I could glimpse a central chamber inside. Besides the transient flashes of photographs, I could sense a central location of light inside, though dim.

When we finally made our way in, I immediately saw the source of light. The inside of the cave was a perfect sphere, its immaculate construction eerie enough to suggest that it was a natural phenomenon rather than something manmade. The interior was enormous, about half the size of a grand ballroom, and able to accommodate enough tourists to ensure an unbroken current of white noise. In the middle of that giant cavern was a natural fountain, a bowl of stone sinking deep into the ground but raised along the perimeter, holding a quantity of sapphire-colored water. Despite the relative low light levels of the cave, I felt qualified to call the water sapphire, as a blue glow emanated from deep in the heart of the pool, swathing the interior in its warm light.

Most visitors hung back from the rim of the pool, enjoying the tranquil atmosphere that the lighting provided. A few more inquisitive tourists and a handful of youngsters, however, pulled closer to the lip of the fountain, staring at their wavering reflections hungrily or attempting to toss coins into the fountain before being accosted by the numerous armed Aisha guards.

"So what's so special about this place anyway?" Hoshiya said with a little sniff, our argument having fizzled out a few minutes earlier. "All the lame lighting of some chique bar and none of the alcohol."

Nonchalantly, we inched towards a tour group not far away, getting close enough to be within earshot of the tour guide. While the tour guide's Aishan accent was noticeable, his Intergalactic was nowhere near as pidgin as Jerry's had been, and we understood him with ease.

"The Great Fountain is the essential element of the Sacred Cave," the tour guide explained. He was a red Aisha with an unexpected collection of hair on his head, pressed down by a sloppy, mud-stained boonie cap. He didn't strike me as an intellectual, but he came off as a reliable source for this sort of folk wisdom. "In ancient times, Aisha priests would come here on religious holidays to pray to their one God. It was believed that on the winter equinox, the great Aisha God would descend to Earth and manifest Himself in these waters, from which the Aisha priests would drink and collect for future blessings. What's so remarkable about the fountain and this cave itself was that it was found with these perfect geometrical proportions, which led the ancients to believe it was the sign of divine work.

"However, not-so-godly things in history have transpired in this cave. Most notably, the death of Princess Shimalda during the Wenti era. It is said that Princess Shimalda loved a peasant Aisha, but because of her royal status was forbidden from wedding him. They decided to elope—he promised to meet her in the Sacred Cavern during the dead of summer. However, he never arrived; and the princess, heartbroken, stayed here in the cavern; not even the holy springs could spare her from starvation. The priests found her on the winter equinox, expired. A truly tragic story. It is said that her ghost still haunts this cavern, causing the walls to perspire spontaneously and a wailing sound to be heard.

"This opening over her is the chamber in which they found poor Princess Shimalda's wilted body. It is closed to visitors, for the place of a royal's death is considered sacred to Aishas," the tour guide explained, and gestured towards an opening in the wall that couldn't have been higher than my chest. I nudged Hoshiya, indicating the opening with a jerk of my head.

"You think the mirror could be in there, maybe? That's where the crying broad died."

"Maybe. We'll need to split up."

"Uh, ok. It's not like there's much area to explore anyway."

"Shut up. You look in the fountain, and I'll covering this opening, all right?"

"Deal."

We moved in opposite directions, she closer to the tour group (who were now taking turns gaping at the arched opening) and I in the other direction, towards a knot of kid creatures around the fountain. Careful to retreat my head substantially into my hood to avoid shedding light on my distinctly non-Nyswanian face, I peered over the edge of the fountain. The water was placid to the point of being glass-like, the shadow of my hood thrown back in my face without a single shiver of liquid-like properties disturbing it. I focused my eyes for below the surface, searching for any sign of something mirror like beyond the very water itself. I looked closely—squinted. Beneath an alarming amount of water, I could almost make out the distorted image of something, if indistinctly.

My focus was disturbed by a sudden commotion behind me. I spun around, yanking at my hood to secure it around my face. A large, luminescent beast seemed to be sprouting from the entrance to Princess Shimalda's resting place, feline and bearing its formidable fangs. The two guards standing at either side of the door were shooting at it with their laser weapons with apparently no success. Tourists and tour guides alike fled in scattered directions, trying to make their way out of the cave as quickly as possible.

I was not as easily fooled by the hallucinations of faerie magic. Although the beast was remarkably realistic, its slight translucency told of its true nature: nothing but a projection of Hoshiya's talent in a roaring, foaming form. I trained my eyes just beside the tiger-like beast, and sure enough, I looked just in time to see Hoshiya's dark-robed form slipping behind her obnoxious distraction into the arched passageway.

I had half the mind to follow her, but at that moment I felt a sharp tugging at the bottom of my robe. Startled, I spun around, all my muscles clenching in preparation of defending myself, or fleeing. At eye-level, I couldn't see anyone close enough to touch me—tipping my chin downwards, I was confronted with a very familiar, very elated Aisha.

"Frank! Frank, is that you? Good God I hope you're not a real Nyswan, or else this is going to be super awkward." The lack of Aishan accent immediately gave away the creature's identity—to which I had to suppress the overwhelming and somewhat girlish urge to gather that little sucker up in my arms and embrace him in relief.

"Gormos! Oh thank betty … I thought we lost you to that psycho forever! And Hoshiya is a gigantic twat, so she wouldn't let me search for you," I explained in low tones. I started to bend down to get on eye-level with Gormos (it was strange enough having to look _down_ at him) but then I remembered my Nyswan masquerade, and a proper Nyswan wouldn't be caught dead bending their pious spines.

"Yeah, well, I managed to con that Jerry character into bringing me to the cave. Said I was meeting some relatives here, that I've been out of town so long I was more comfortable talking in Intergalactic," Gormos explained, a stupid, simple grin plastered across his face. (I imagined mine looked similar.) "She dropped me off here with good tidings. I didn't expect you guys to make it here so quick, though!"

"Yeah, no thanks to the directionally challenged citizens of Aisha City," I grumbled. "But here we are, safe and sound. That commotion, you may have surmised, is care of our favorite faerie."

"Speaking of Hoshi, did she maybe tell you how long this potion works for? I mean, as much as I love staring at the butts of every passerby that isn't an Aisha, I don't think this species arrangement is going to work out," Gormos said, a pinch of whining in the back of his tone.

"Nah, not a clue. Maybe you've got to will yourself back to being a Kougra?" I suggested with a shrug.

"Psst!"

The interjection of a third voice into our reunion shocked both of us, causing us to lurch in the direction of the sound. Gormos' fur, short though it was, visibly bristled, and I could feel my muscles getting tight all over again. The voice seemed to originate from the pool behind us. Most visitors had fled from the cave at this point due to the ruckus Hoshiya had set up at the back of the cave, and none took the time to dawdle around the perimeter of the fountain. Even with this momentary privacy at the pool, I was still alarmed and anxious (not to mention completely taken aback) by seeing Hoshiya's head poke up from the skin of the water, her mouth submerged to keep herself low, mouth only breeching to speak softly.

I looked either way for safety's sake before leaning over the fountain's rim to stare at her. "What the heck, faerie? I could've sworn I just saw you enter that little room over there."

"I did," she sputtered, spitting some water out of her mouth. "There's a pool in there too, deeper. It leads through a tunnel to this fountain. There's a waterfall in that little room, too, so that explains where all this water is coming from."

"I could care less about scientific explanations of this cave's natural phenomenon. Did you find anything resembling a mirror?" I asked impatiently.

"How about you help me out of this pool first?" She extended a hand above water to be grasped. I grabbed her and helped boost her out of the water she had been treading. She seemed to have lost her robe in the process, and was dressed only in her normal clothes, her natural, legally-"wanted" face agonizingly visible. Her wings gave a little shudder, expelling any residue water clinging to them. Paranoid, I moved closer to her, hoping my body would provide an adequate shield for any suspicious eyes in at least one direction. "Could you not stand so close, Frank?" she snapped irritably when I edged closer.

"Sorry, sweetheart, I just had this crazy idea that we wouldn't want your face conspicuously out in the open when you're a wanted fugitive," I replied dryly.

"Forget that, everyone's too concerned with saving their own tails right now," she said, gesturing towards her still-functioning magical illusion of a roaring tiger. Aisha guards continued to fire round after round at the mirage to no avail, only doing damage to the smooth roof of the cave.

"Hey, Hoshiya, I find it interesting how you have to use a _fake_ tiger to distract everyone when we could have a _real_ one right here," I said, motioning towards Gormos on the ground. This cued Gormos to chime in, his high voice even higher with his annoyance.

"Yeah, you think you could maybe turn me back into a Kougra now?" he asked pointedly. "I mean, especially if you've got everybody distracted, it shouldn't matter, right?"

Hoshiya's tough, careless countenance fell upon seeing Gormos, and she scrambled to reconstruct it to the same level of nonchalance. "Good to see you, Gormos. Now maybe Frank'll stop getting his panties in such a twist about you being all alone and unable to fend for yourself," Hoshiya said, looking more at me than at Gormos.

"What was that?" Gormos demanded, his accusatory stare shifting to me.

"Oh no you don't, don't you dare go redirecting his rage at me, faerie, you didn't even properly answer his question," I snapped, glaring at Hoshiya. Hoshiya raised an eyebrow at me, and then shrugged heavily, as if attempting to pretend that it didn't matter either way to her.

"Transmogrification potions are tricky. They're a self-contained potion, which means they're a self-contained spell—as in self-running. That means I can't stop it; it just has to run its course."

"And how long, exactly, is this course going to be?" Gormos asked, looking a little bit too hopeful for his own good.

"Depends," was her single-word answered, delivered with a shrug.

"Wait, let me get this straight. You let Gormos drink this Transmogrifiwhatever potion … with no idea of how long it's going to last?" I said incredulously, hoping she couldn't possibly have actually been that careless.

Hoshiya shrugged again. "It seemed like the only option at the time."

"Versus _what_!?" I cried in exasperation.

"Look, you two can fret all you want about how long it's going to take Gormos to turn back—truth of the matter is _he will_, but in good time," Hoshiya said, obviously aggravated by the doubt we were shedding on her spells. "For the time being, let's worry about something relevant, okay? Like the fact I couldn't find any frickin' mirror in that room, or in the fountain for that matter, and heck, there wasn't even any weeping Aisha chick to lead the way."

Reluctantly, I shifted my internal thoughts from verbally berating Hoshiya to focusing on the task at hand. "Maybe 'mirror' wasn't referring to something so literally. Maybe 'mirror' is just referring to some reflective surface—like water."

"Yeah, so maybe we're supposed to take a sample of this water right here," Gormos suggested, motioning towards the fountain.

Without further deliberation, Hoshiya conjured a small vial in the palm of her hand. Unstopping it, she dipped it slightly under the surface of the water, recorking it three-fourths filled with water. She handed it over to me, and I slipped it inside of my robe. With that task so easily accomplished, we all had a moment of standing around in a loose triangle, staring at each other purposelessly.

"Well, that was easy," Gormos commented flatly. "Now how 'bout we skedaddle?"


	13. In which cryptic cliche shit happens

Any hopes of an easy exit were washed from our minds only a few seconds later. The middle of the fountain erupted without warning, a blemish in the unbroken surface bubbling up and them emerging in a magnificent spray. All three of us whirled to face the fountain, along with the poor remaining souls in the cave. The explosion startled Hoshiya enough to break the spell guarding the forbidden door, the reddish tiger dissolving into wisps of opaque smoke.

The eruption had expelled something from inside the fountain. Levitating above the middle of the fountain appeared to be a fragment of glass, slowly rotating around an invisible axis. Orbiting this large chunk of last was a celestial form, translucent and not wholly tangible. Its shape was impossible to make out while it was moving, but as it decelerated to a stop, the figure revealed itself to be a specter in an Aisha shape, dressed in clothes that were made of tattered yet high-quality material. Her fur pink in color, the Aisha wore a delicate silver circlet about her forehead, suggesting nobility.

"Well, I think we found our dead princess," I mumbled to the group.

The ghostly Aisha princess unwound herself from the repetitive circular path she made around the glass, and drifted down to where the three of us stood. She addressed Hoshiya in particular, whose skin still glistened with the evaporating water of the fountain. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that no one else in the cave seemed to be conscious of the supernatural event occurring before them—in fact, no one seemed to be moving at all. Every visitor or employee was frozen in place, their expressions and movements trapped in one single instance. Although it made no logical sense from a scientific perspective, it seemed as though time had stopped. Gormos seemed similarly time-locked, but this was a product of his will—he was straight-out terrified, his only movement produced by trembling.

"Thou disturbeth me," the Aisha princess said critically, her slitted eyes additionally narrowed. "Why hast thou done so? Why dost thou not leave me in miserable peace?"

I couldn't seriously believe that a ghost that had presumably been haunting people in the present would stick to such a tacky, ancient dialect, but Hoshiya rolled with it. She seemed completely nonplussed that she was conversing with a dead soul. "My name is Hoshiya, and I come from Faerieland, far across the galaxy. I'm here to retrieve one of the components for the Fountain of Youth for my venerable queen Fyora."

The Aisha princess—Shimalda, I guessed it was—reeled back in surprise, doing a little mid-air flip. "Thou seekest the elixir of eternal life? Thou seekest to tread that most trepidatious path?"

"Yeah, we do," I interjected casually, "and if you could maybe give us a few pointers of where to find the other ingredients, we'd be just the most grateful little ingrates around." Hoshiya jabbed me markedly in the ribs for this outburst.

"Excuse the manners of my friend—he's not of a civilized people," Hoshiya apologized, shooting me a venomous look. "Yes, we seek the elixir of life, and in particular, the first component—the mirror."

Princess Shimalda considered Hoshiya for a moment, as if assessing whether or not she was worthy to possess the mirror. "Thou hast come to the proper place," Princess Shimalda remarked with a solemn nod. "Here I spent my last hours in misery, and weep about it ever after. I do guard this mirror that thou seeketh. Thou may view it before thyself." She gave a sweeping gesture back at the irregular piece of glass still spinning of its own volition behind her. "However, I must know that thy motives are pure. The elixir of life is an ancient, dangerous secret. Why dost each of thou seeketh the elixir of life?"

"To prove myself worthy of inclusion in Faerie society," Hoshiya said unusually quiet, her head bowed low. "I am an exile, and was promised entrance if I sought out and discovered the Fountain of Youth for my queen." There was shame evident in her admission: I could see a rosy blush creep up along the side of her neck, and the remarkable vulnerability she displayed made her seem almost dear, someone secretly craving love and acceptance. To distance myself from feeling empathy, I reminded myself she was still a faerie—and thus unforgivable.

"A most sympathetic cause," Princess Shimalda crooned. Unexpectedly, she moved on from Hoshiya to me, floating right in front of me. Her eyes, turquoise-colored, were surprisingly clear and real despite the relative inconsistency of the rest of her body. "Now thee, young sir. What dost thou seeketh the Fountain of Youth for?"

Instead of explaining my predicament to the ghost, I pulled out my left hand from under my robes, splaying out my fingers palm-up so she could see the cursed mark making its deadly way across my skin. "I'm cursed," I said simply, electing to omit the part where Hoshiya was the one that did the cursing. "It's a slow-moving curse, but it's a curse that will destroy me. There's no cure, so I'm hedging my bets on this. I figured this potion might be able to lift it."

"Perhaps, Cursed One, it will," Shimalda agreed, bobbing her head dreamily. She turned herself to Gormos at last, who looked about ready to piss himself in fear. (I was surprised there wasn't already a puddle of yellow collecting beneath him.) "And you, Young Aisha." At this point she began to address him in Aishaspeak. The annoyance at being misidentified as a legitimate Aisha for the umpteenth time outweighed Gormos' fear of the supernatural, and he found the power to speak.

"Uh, actually, I only speak Intergalactic common, so if you could keep talking like you were talking, that would be great," Gormos said sheepishly. Princess Shimalda looked slightly embarrassed, and then irritated, but did as Gormos requested.

"Why dost thou seeketh the Fountain of Youth?"

Gormos shrugged. "I'm really just along for the ride. Frank here is my best buddy—you know, the Cursed One—and I figured I should come along to make sure he doesn't hurt himself. I've really got no interest in eternal life; we Kougras live long enough anyway."

Princess Shimalda examined him closely, but after a time seemed content with his story. "A truly selfless soul—thou art a rare breed indeed, Aisha-But-Not. Cumulatively, the three of thee have proven thyselves sufficiently worthy of the mirror." Princess Shimalda turned away from us for a second, and pointed her index finger towards the levitating glass. A hairline fracture ran through the edge of the glass, and then split deeper, breaking off a piece of the glass. This chipped-off piece descended towards the three of us. Hoshiya held out her hands as if receiving something holy, and the glass settled itself in her hands. She winced slightly.

"Cold," she murmured, her eyes transfixed with the rainbows glittering off the glass' many facets. Gently, she passed it over to me, who tucked it in my pocket next to the vial of water.

"Let me warn thee, however, of the dividing effects the Fountain of Youth may have," Princess Shimalda said, her tone shifting from one of solemn inquisition to grave warning. "Since I giveth you the glass, the mirror, I will provide ample reflection for thou. Personal greed is not the greatest foe thee willst encounter on the path to the Fountain's discovery. Each of thee hast great potential: I see in the Faerie a great capacity for love, and with it a great talent for magic; within the Cursed One, a great intelligence and ambition; and within the Aisha-But-Not, an unflagging loyalty and tremendous good heart. However, thee must be aware that great qualities can also beget terrible vices. In the Faerie, great love begets great hatred, and magic may be used for horrendous acts. In the Cursed One—ambition and intelligence are a volatile combination. And Aisha-But-Not—beware that thy loyalties do not betray thy heart."

With these last golden nuggets of advice, Princess Shimalda resumed her tireless circling of the fragment of glass. The princess solidly in orbit—fast enough to reduce to a blur of pink and silver—the glass gradually descended back into the water, hitting the surface with a subdued splash, and then plunging under. The water seemed to boil for a moment after the figure disappeared beneath it, but by measure, the water returned to its eerie stillness.

It was about at that moment that time returned to its normal schedule—but, in an attempt to make up for lost minutes, it seemed to play out for us in double speed. The guards that had been centering their efforts on the imaginary tiger no longer had any viable targets, besides the strange hooded figure, his winged friend, and the green Aisha suspiciously congregated around the Sacred Fountain with dazed looks in their deviant eyes. The captain of the guards evidently decided that, logically, these strangers must be the source of all the chaos unfolding in the cave, and as such must be speedily eliminated.

Before we could even regain our bearings, we were surrounded by a tight, aggressive, and pissed-off circle of Aisha cave guards, all dressed in standard-issue green jumpsuits and armed with identical semiautomatic rifles, all barrels cocked at us.

"Well, aren't we just in a pretty bind," I grumbled to myself. Assessing the situation, I could see few gaps in the guards' barricade. Clearly they had studied and practiced this containment formation before, like flight patterns rehearsed by experienced pilots. Hoshiya held out her hands in a stance suggesting preparation for a throwdown, but despite her magical prowess, she was clearly outnumbered, especially having to defend the dead weight of a defenseless Gormos and me. Gormos, seeming to have forgotten his diminutive size, was bristling next to me, letting loose a pathetic little growl that would've been formidable with a larger larynx.

I, on the other hand, crossed my arms against my chest and rocked back on one leg, letting out a long breath of air. A certain amount of resign enveloped me, and in an instant I had become comfortable with the utter hopelessness of our predicament. "Now to wait for the _deux ex machina_," I muttered.

And lo! Just as Hoshiya was about to launch a suicide blow into a dozen rifle barrels, half of the guards inexplicably buckled at the knees. This provided the other half to fire reactively, but their second of shock at seeing their comrades fall gave Gormos and I enough time to dodge out of their line of fire. Hoshiya, her opponents halved, turned to the remainder of the guards, throwing up an invisible barrier to block the laser fire, plasma energy bouncing off the screen like raindrops.

Gormos and I huddled behind Hoshiya, directly behind the line of dazed, fallen Aisha guards. I searched for the cause of their automatic surrender—and there, right next to me, sidling up to Gormos with a little too much interest, is Jerry, that batty little Aisha making her google eyes at Gormos and stroking his shoulder with one hand, a taser held in the other.

"Long time no see, stranger," she gushed to Gormos.

"Hey!" I shouted reactively, and Jerry looked up to me placidly, as if she had never aimed a gun at my forehead.

"You want something, Mr. Fugitive?"

"Want to explain why you've decided to help us after nearly blasting me away as a bounty?" I demanded. We all ducked in unison to avoid a sudden spray of bullets that Hoshiya hadn't blocked, and then immediately resumed our exposition.

"Well, you no good as a bounty in police's hands," Jerry said with a snort. "Besides, friend here made you sound pretty decent. I not going to turn you in, no way. I your friend!"

"Okay, if that's the truth, how about you get us out of here, huh?" I challenged. Jerry seemed completely oblivious to the fact that Gormos kept slipping out of her blatant advances.

"I got taxi waiting outside. I drive you back to ship. You got what you need, yes?"

I felt around inside my robe, my fingers hitting upon the cold surface of the glass. "That's an affirmative."

"Alright. Follow me. I know better way out."

And then Jerry, Gormos firmly in tow, leaped over the rim of the fountain and into the deep pool, diving underneath the surface. I had no option but to follow, although it seemed like we were back-pedaling in terms of progression. Before diving to pursue Gormos and Jerry, I made sure Hoshiya saw where I was going, bobbing in the water for a moment to catch her attention. I took a curt nod from her as the go-ahead signal. Giving one final bob with a greedy gulp of air, I bent myself at the waist underwater and reversed my direction of travel to down.

Daring to open my eyes, I saw clearly that the depth of the fountain was impressive, perhaps larger than the cave itself, and certainly extending beyond the span of the circle of water above ground. Many openings marked tunnels to unknown ends, but Jerry headed towards a very specific entrance, Gormos flailing along behind her. I swam after them, my robe billowing around me in the zero gravity of submersion. While my wings caused significant drag to my success in speedy swimming, I still clutched one hand firm against my chest as I was determined not to lose that essential fragment of glass, further slowing me down. Hoshiya was paddling behind me in no time, and soon even passing me. Naturally competitive, I took this bait to struggle to move faster, quite a feat considering the absence of oxygen.

The tunnel Jerry selected led us to an underground chamber that thankfully contained a bit of air. While it was completely lightless in the air pocket—Hoshiya employed to provide us with a glowing orb of light to lead our way—Jerry assured us that it led to the outside, and even closer to where she parked her taxi.

Our travel through the tunnel was eerily quiet, even Gormos neglecting to ignite a conversation. Secret exchanges between two people was impossible, as the acoustics of the cave amplified even the slightest sound, so Gormos and I kept relatively silent. Surprisingly, it was Hoshiya who started talking, she at the back of the line to fend off any followers.

"So what'd everyone think about what the princess was talking about?"

"You mean 'the dividing effects of the Fountain of Youth?'" I snorted. "Sounds like a bunch malarkey to me. Another one of those superstitious crap stories that impede progress by making people second-guess themselves."

"Sounds just like the reaction someone insanely ambitious would give," Hoshiya retorted dryly.

"Hey, faerie, I'm not too up for a sound round right now, and I still have your life at the press of a button in my pocket, so how about we don't start this now, okay?" I snapped. While this managed to muzzle Hoshiya, I could sense her overwhelming desire to snap back at me, barely restrained by the threat of instantaneous heart failure. The sound of dripping water plunking into the puddles at our feet punched through the thick silence of our reluctant quartet.

My lungs let out a sigh of relief once natural light became visible; it seemed we wandered in the darkness forever before spotting the first trace of sunlight. Eager to escape to fresh air and light, I pressed ahead of Jerry, who didn't stop me from continuing straight. Without realizing it, my desire to attain the end of the tunnel set me significantly ahead of the rest of the group, and soon I was idling not far from the exit of the passage, waiting for the orb of light far behind me to catch up to where I stood.

Unfortunately, I hadn't counted on being attacked at this alternate exit-way, but that's exactly what happened. Of course, I had given the exterior of the passage a look-around to make sure it was sufficiently inconspicuous for a smooth getaway, but once assuring myself of its security, I had no qualms with turning my attention back to the tunnel. This was a bad assumption, as without warning I felt a heavy blow land just below my neck, just missing dealing me a potentially lethal crack to the skull.


	14. In which Gormos kicks ass, takes names

Nevertheless, the surprise from the first blow was enough to knock me flat on the ground, my hands barely whipping forward in time to spare my face from colliding with the rocky ground. Stupidly, I turned over to get a look at my assailant, only to be firmly clocked on the clavicle. Still, I managed to get an eyeful of my anonymous attacker: an Aisha guard, using his semiautomatic as a billy club. Reeling in pain, I grabbed at my injured shoulder, inadvertently rolling to my side and offering the Aisha guard a clear shot of my hip and ribs, which he bashed with equal gusto. And despite all the pain sizzling through my body, I could only think of the sort of injuries I would sustain from this attack: the ugly bruises, purple mixed unevenly with rose, the bones with hairline fractures like the warnings of an earthquake, and the bones shattered, a whole reduced to so many dagger-like puzzle pieces.

My mind—perhaps in an attempt to divorce from the pain—recalled a pelvis shattered into sixty-three pieces that I had, piece by agonizing piece, fused back into a functioning whole. It had been my masterwork; it was my "surgery story" that defined my career, and ultimately what landed me the privilege of being in that space station while my species down on Neopia suffered. Funny: to think how one unfortunate Feather's pain and tragedy could have ultimately granted me borrowed time.

I saw colorful streaks of some conjuration race above me, aimed at my assailant. Yet the bludgeoning didn't cease—instead, I heard laser fire in retaliation, and a groan unleashed by a female voice. It was difficult to discern the things that were going on around me, but it became clear that there was more than a single Aisha guard. There had to be at least one providing my assailant backup, the one who fired his gun at Hoshiya after her spell. Blood was getting in my eyes—writhing on the ground, I dashed my forehead open—so I couldn't see if she had been badly wounded by the bullets. I could hear Gormos and Jerry's spirited verbal protests; as far as I could tell, they were merely being restrained, rather than legitimately attacked.

My beating seemed needlessly gratuitous, seeing as Gormos and Jerry had been presumably captured, and Hoshiya neutralized, so I turned my scarlet-hued vision up to my assailant. "Why?" I demanded, to which he responded by striking me hard across the cheek, nearly buckling in my nose.

"Because I hate tourists," spat the Aisha guard, and hit me another solid one across the face.

"Are you going to kill me then?" I asked, making no attempt to strike him back. The Aisha grinned sadistically.

"I know you a fugitive. I am a cop, how would not I know? Dead or alive. Doesn't matter, then, does it?" Another blow to the head, and I was struggling to maintain consciousness. I could only imagine the state of my face: bloodied and beaten, maybe mashed up like a squashed piece of fruit. Oddly, I didn't blame the Aisha; I couldn't impart any hatred upon him. Needless, senseless violence brought on by an overwhelming urge for release; I could relate to it, distantly, and it seemed hypocritical of me to blame someone for indulging in an animal instinct.

Just as the world was beginning to get black around the edges, a deafening roar echoed through the opening of the cave, though originating from the outside. Immediately my attacker stopped; I strained upwards as much as my weary, beaten muscles would allow me. I could see at the very mouth of the cave Hoshiya holding her stomach in paralyzing agony, her hand cupped over her wound, smoke slipping out from between her fingers from laser burns. Outside of the cave were two additional Aisha guards to the one that was wailing on me, one of these extras holding a squirming Jerry firmly. The other guard might've formerly been restraining Gormos, but now was standing a good distance away from the still-Green-Aisha, the guard regarding Gormos with a look of fear. Gormos was red-faced and pissed, baring his tiny Aisha teeth—which, curiously, seemed to be growing in length by the moment.

"You dirty pigs!" Gormos roared, and with each word he spoke his voice tuned down a note, gradually restored to its original booming bass. He seemed to be growing in proportion to his rage: small Aisha ears flaring out into the fur-filled scoops of Kougra ears, green fur blazing with black stripes and becoming blue and shaggy, his height increasing by the moment like some sort of angry transformation. As Gormos' original form emerged from the Aisha ruse, I realized with a start how terrifying my old friend actually was. With incisors more like steak knives and ear flattened against his skull in anger, towering over the Aishas by twice their height and three times their bulk, even I felt a tremor of terror pierce through me.

I had never seen Gormos in such a fit—even when wrangling a particularly difficult engine, or dealing with a snippy ship owner who thought they knew more about mechanics than the actual mechanic, his anger rarely exceeded a mild irritation, which often devolved into a detached, childish amusement. He was blessed with that indifference available to individuals who had always been more powerful than their peers: there was never a need to be aggressive and prove their physical dominance, as it was assumed. Seeing him at the peak of his wrath, then, was jarring, my image of Gormos as a peaceful, playful soul forever shaken by this new creature with teeth and gums fully exposed, fur raised almost vertically and golden eyes glinting with unbridled fury.

It only took a single blow from Gormos' paw—scythe-like claws fully extended—to knock my assailant hard against the side of the cave, like a baseball bat hitting a wiffle ball off a tee. With the other two Aisha guards coming back to their senses, Gormos had to deal with a rain of bullets coming in his direction, which he seemed to shake off like water droplets. Two more sweeps of his massive forearms sent the remaining guards out of commission; Gormos relieved their unconscious bodies of the rifles and hurled them against the side of the cave. Then it was all over, Gormos barely panting with exertion, standing between a staring Jerry and me, buck naked save for his fur.

He closed his eyes for a minute, and his composure returned, as if channeled back into his brain by some invisible source. "You okay, Frank?"

"Oh, marvelous," I replied shakily. I attempted to get to my feet, but found my abdominal muscles, thoroughly bludgeoned, refused to support a standing position. Clumsily, I crashed back into the twisted, somewhat reclined position I had assumed while being beaten. "Never better. I just decided to take a little rest right now … the bleeding is incidental."

Gormos grinned sharply, yet even with a pleasant expression I now saw those teeth in a different light, with more than just the _potential_ for ferocity. "Solid enough to still be a sarcastic bastard. How 'bout you, Hoshi?"

"A little bit … crispy," she answered between clenched teeth, her hands still tightly closed over her abdomen. "I'm having … trouble with getting the proper healing spell for these wounds … the Aishas must be using a new kind of laser, because I've been able to heal this kind of thing before … augh …" The tail end of her reply consisted of an unintelligible string of curses and grunts of pain.

"Frank'll fix that later," Gormos reassured her. I was in far too much pain to refute his offering my services. He prodded back towards the opening of the cave where I lay and scooped me off the rock, slinging me over his shoulder like a light load, picking up Hoshiya in the same fashion. He even had the foresight enough to arrange our bodies so our heads weren't facing, my head hanging down Gormos' chest while hers dangled down his back, subverting any pointless pain-induced quarrels. (Though once or twice I did attempt to dock Hoshiya in the face with my heel, which she justly repaid by disgustingly and somewhat impressively jamming her toe up my nose.)

With the two of us in tow, he hopped out of the cave, stepped delicately over the unconscious Aisha guards, and approached Jerry, who had been spending the past ten minutes staring slack-jawed at the scene. Blushing in a Kougra fashion, he smiled sheepishly. "Uh, Jerry, you think you can do me a favor?"

"You not an Aisha!" Jerry blurted, utterly dumbfounded.

"Uh, actually, no, m'names Gormos Brahmin Kougra, and I'm not an Aisha. I'm not even biologically related to Aishas, and there's no way we could ever breed, oh, ho, ho, no. Heck, I don't even think we share the same type of DNA. Frank, whattya say?"

"Nope, completely different DNA," I answered over his shoulder.

"See, there you go. But hey, that shouldn't make our relationship any different, right? We're still buddies, right?" The strain in Gormos' voice was evident.

Jerry didn't reply for a long time, letting her brain take its sweet time to process this onrush of information. Slowly, she began raising her index finger to her temple, as if coming across a revelation. "Thaaaat … would explain how you not talk Aishaspeak!" she gasped, the puzzle pieces finally falling neatly into place. She pounded her fist into her open palm, mentally solving a second mystery. "And you the third missing fugitive!"

"Bingo, Jerry. You got us. But hey, since we're buddies now and all, you think you could do us a favor, and just bring us back to the Aisha City space port? We really gotta get going on this Fountain of Youth thing," Gormos implored Jerry, a note of pleading in his voice. I stole a glance at Gormos' face: plastered on it was that innocent smile he always used to worm his way into people's hearts. With Gormos' oafish charm on full blast, not even a hardened taxi driver like Jerry could resist bending to his whim.

Jerry did, however, require one condition to getting us smoothly to the space port and out of the Aisha home world orbit: that we take her along with us to some as-of-yet-undefined destination. While the fitful grumbling produced from behind Gormos' back suggested one of our crew opposed this idea, the ship did technically belong to Gormos. As such, our ragtag trio became a motley quartet. We cruised somewhat clearly out of the space sport, although we did have to disguise Jerry as the tongueless Aisha who "originally" docked the ship, and board Gormos by hiding him in a shipping box marked as a 'large souvenir.'

I was assigned to tend to the wounded, half of those in question being me. My nose still bleeding considerably, I sequestered the cringing Hoshiya into one of the bedrooms, armed with a first aid kit and various medicinal ointments. I instructed her to lay flat on her back so I could get a clear view of her stomach injury. Reluctantly, and with visible pain, she laid herself out on the floor, stretching her arms over her head. Her toned abdominals were branded with several ugly burns in centralized blast points, the laser equivalent of a bullet hole. I selected a burn salve from my arsenal and began smoothing a layer over the bright red wounds. I could feel her muscles contract under my fingers, strong and taut.

"Good betty that's cold," she complained, squirming under my hands. "And not relieving my pain that much. In fact, I think it's starting to hurt worse." Her voice began to pitch towards the end of her sentence, her discomfort level growing.

"Quit your griping, faerie, my blood's still busy clotting over here," I sneered. Unfortunately, I was telling the truth: my nose had decided to play the role of a perpetually drippy faucet with scarlet water, and every so often a bead of blood would issue from the gash under my eye. "I'm going to have to give myself stitches, and let me tell you something, I'm _not_ looking forward to poking a threaded needle through my skin."

"Then let me heal it," Hoshiya suggested, her face contorted with displeasure at the stinging sensation of the salve. "It's not that I can't heal at all, it's just that I can't heal these particular type of burns. Regular skin tears like yours should be no problem."

Automatically, I began to shoot down her suggestion with my standard anti-magic prejudice. Yet curiosity slowed my protest, and as I began to secure down a cross hatch of bandages over Hoshiya's wounds with medical tape, I found my head bobbing up and down, my interest getting the better of me. "Yeah, well, guess it can't hurt for you to close up one of them."

The look of utter shock on Hoshiya's face at my compliance reflected perfectly what I was feeling inside. Determined to approach this coolly, though, I regarded her blandly, giving an indifferent shrug of my shoulders. "Don't give me that look. It was your idea, right?" After smoothing out the medical tape borders of Hoshiya's bandages, I gestured towards my face, more of a challenge than an invitation. "Go on, then. Go for the big leagues—the one on the forehead." From what I had glimpsed of my mashed-up mug, the worst injury I had incurred was the gash that ran diagonally from the crown of my head to right above my left eyebrow. I ran my finger along its crusting edges, as if targeting the wound for Hoshiya.

Haltingly, Hoshiya sat up. She reached for my forehead, stopping midway with a jerk, as if expecting me to strike out at her. When I remained patiently still, she let her hand travel the rest of the way, resting her fore and middle finger in the deepest canyon of the wound. I winced slightly with the salt of her skin attacking the raw flesh, but otherwise remained unmoving. She closed her eyes to concentrate, and the burning of her fingertips inside the gash softened to pulsating warmth. Under her touch, light and comforting, my skin shivered: I felt the edges of the wound pucker together at the very tip, readhering themselves in a solid seal of new flesh.

A base excitement collected in my stomach at the sensation of magic closing my wound like a zipper at either end, but I kept a poker face, making sure not to seem too impressed. After only a half minute, Hoshiya removed her fingers from my forehead. My blood was on her hands, a cherry stain she rubbed off on her pant leg. "There," she declared, soberly pleased with her work. "No scar, nothing. Like it was never there at all." Her eyes flickered down to the wound right under my right eye, crescent-shaped. "Now for this one…"

I intercepted her hand groping to heal a second wound, wanting to heal at least one of my injures by conventional methods. For a few agonizing seconds our hands overlapped: and to my surprise, instead of feeling a relentless loathing, I feel something like electricity exchanged across our skin, an instinctual communication bypassing civilized speech.

And then I saw the wound on that same hand, and that understanding dissolved.

"How about you leave that one to the expert?" I suggested, keeping my tone cold and professional. My feigned indifference came off successfully: Hoshiya retreated from me with the same predictable repugnance, wrinkling her nose.

"Feather can't even admit magic's usefulness after I save you from bleeding to death?" she said, obviously disgusted with my insolence. Outwardly, I shrugged with cocky apathy. Yet inwardly my stomach churned, unable to digest a sliver of uncertainty towards my opinion of Hoshiya.


End file.
